HT Wired Wisdom: A weekly newsletter on all things tech

Good morning!

This time last year, we were still waiting around for progress on 5G mobile networks. In fact, it was only towards the end of the year when things started progressing. What a difference a period of 7-months has made. Airtel’s 5G network is live in 3,000 cities and counting. Reliance Jio’s 5G network currently covers over 3,972 cities and counting. More of India’s 650 million (and of course, counting still) smartphone user base can access faster mobile internet if they so wish to. Think of 5G on your phone as the first phase, home broadband will likely be the next chapter.

Read (Premium):?5G keeps up the pace, as price wars may belatedly transform home broadband

As Airtel and Jio have reset the experience and connectivity benchmark so many times in the past 7 months or so, the likes of Vi have been left far behind. Far behind. Is there any hope of a Vi comeback, making it a troika again? Just like the good old times. Unlikely, barring a miracle (and a lot of funding). Nevertheless, we look forward to 5G’s next logical progression. An alternative to home broadband. For years, India’s wired broadband reach (and interest) has remained a cause of concern. The numbers don’t make for pretty reading.

India’s wired broadband user base, as per the latest Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) numbers ending March 2023, is at 33.49 million subscribers. Guess how many mobile broadband (that’d include 3G, 4G and 5G on smartphones and dongles) users there are? That’d be 811.99 million, thank you very much. Even the pandemic’s remote work demands in 2020 and 2021 didn’t give wired broadband the sort of boost it perhaps should have. That said, Jio and then Airtel rolled out even more affordable broadband subscription plans in April (around Rs 199 onwards) – if those have made any impact, we’ll know in subsequent data.

• Is pricing a factor which makes potential users consider home broadband an ‘additional expense’?
• Are there connectivity and availability issues in many regions, which deter users from a tryst with what may be unreliable home broadband connections (and the annoyances of disconnections and support that come with it)?
• With users getting accustomed to much faster 5G mobile speeds (data from analytics firms Ookla and Opensignal illustrate fascinating trends), is there a need to reconsider the 20Mbps and 30Mbps entry spec broadband plans to something that starts at minimum 100Mbps speeds?

5G could be the backbone, if we are to indeed embark on a broadband expansion spree in the country. The wired route hasn’t worked for years, including issues with cost of acquiring subscribers, last mile access and local permissions. It may be time to go wireless. 5G, particularly using the mmWave frequencies (24GHz to 40aGHz for faster bandwidth), can theoretically deliver speeds as fast as 1Gbps to a router-esque consumer premise equipment (CPE) in a user’s home. No wiring needed, it simply connects with the 5G network, much like how your phone does, and creates a Wi-Fi network inside the home.

Two parts to that saga, as it’ll unfold.

• Ericsson’s research estimates as many as 235 million active 5G FWA connections in India by 2028. Jio has already confirmed intentions to roll out their oft-teased AirFiber services, as soon as “critical mass” is achieved with the 5G network.
• Cost may be a bit of a concern, at least initially. Analysts tell us, any reliable and good 5G CPE is likely to cost around Rs 15,000 for now. Even if Airtel and Reliance Jio are to absorb some of that cost, it’ll still potentially be as expensive as the expected pricing for Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite broadband. Uptake may be slow in that case.

As someone who believes wired broadband is a more reliable route as the default connectivity option at home, using a 5G FWA may be a bit of a learning curve. But from what we’ve experienced with 5G on our phones so far, stability isn’t a concern. But with wireless networks, sensitivity to factors always shows up at some point. More users, one of them.

REALITY

Do we not need photographers and editors anymore? Realignment of jobs humans otherwise do, is usually the first port of call during a conversation about the widening scope and capabilities of AI. Generative AI, as the name probably already hints at, can be used to create a images, videos, audio and text, with neural networks using existing data sets to create new data. One popular use case, image generator tools, which generate images based on text inputs.

Read:?Words to images: Blurring boundaries between real memories and AI creations

Someone clearly took the pains to punch in “Photo of Donald Trump being arrested” in the Midjourney tool (turns out, the premium version was used, and hence such accuracy) to give the already bungling Twittersphere more reason to get confused. That wasn’t the only one. Pope Francis wearing a stylish white puffer jacket. Elon Musk’s robot wife. A supposed explosion near the Pentagon. Computer engineers working on a highway. An ageing Ryan Gosling. More examples.

So, how do you identify a fake image? This is the question that’s likely giving many tech companies some sleepless nights. Microsoft’s perhaps the only one to admit it. When?Microsoft’s Brad Smith?says, “we will have to address the issues around deep fakes”, there is no scope to shove this under the carpet anymore.

• I’ll let you in on a secret. You cannot, at least not easily. Often, the only way to differentiate an AI generated image from a real one, is to look for how finer features such as skin tone, shape of the eyes, fingers, the nose or teeth are rendered.

Look closely at the image of engineers working along the motorway. You’ll notice discrepancies with rendering of facial expressions and elements such as hands and nose. But will you? If an AI generated image stumped judges at a global photography competition, the rest of humanity doesn’t have much hope. Do they?

The human brain is trained in such a way that we tend to process a visual message much faster than a text. “We know from research that the human brain processes visual information about 60,000 times faster than text, making visual tools a critical way people search, create and gain understanding,” says Yusuf Mehdi, who is Corporate Vice President and Consumer Chief Marketing Officer at Microsoft, the company that recently rolled out the Bing Image Creator AI tool.

That isn’t the only one. Adobe Firefly. Midjourney. Dall-E. Stable Diffusion. Freeway. Bing Image Creator. Picsart. Nightcafe AI. Craiyon. Starry AI. Jasper. Photosonic. Just some more tools, a click away.

I’ve to admit, there is a certain curiosity about what Adobe is doing with AI. The tech company has added the Firefly generative AI within the popular Photoshop app. That had, started out as a standalone tool launched a few weeks prior. The core feature emerging from this is something called “Generative Fill”, which will allow users to modify and edit images with more AI tools at their disposal.

In the future, we can perhaps spend more time wondering – which of our photos are real memories, and which have been cobbled together by AI?

KNOW

• AI focus continues as the summer of developer conferences unfolds. Microsoft’s big bets are a?Copilot AI tool?that’ll work across Windows 11 PCs and eventually across its range of apps and services including Microsoft 365 that includes the office suite. If you think the positioning, with Bing Chat as the foundation resembles the now defunct Cortana, you wouldn’t be wrong. Second is Bing now becoming the default search engine for the ChatGPT platform, just as that adopts live search capabilities.

• By the time you read this, the Taipei International Information Technology Show (you’d recognise this as Computex) would be underway. Aside from all the talk about AI and inevitably components (GPUs, displays etc), laptops seem to be very much in focus. Acer has the 16-inch Predator Triton and Swift Edge laptops, aimed squarely at gamers and the creator demographics. MSI is still trying to make a mark in the premium Windows laptops space dominated by HP and Dell, with the new Prestige 16. Suddenly, “16” seems to be the go-to screen size for laptops?

Written and edited by Vishal Shanker Mathur. Produced by Md Shad Hasnain.