FROM NETWORK PROGRAMMING TO PROGRAMMABLE NETWORKS

摘要

It was the spring of 1994 when I first stepped into the amazing and ever-evolving world of telecom. The telecom industry as we know it today didn't exist then. DoT was about everything in telecom-from policy to regulation, and from execution to go-to-market. Tele-density was 0.8% and there was a 'waiting list' for eight million phones. Mobile phones did not exist. One joined the DoT through Indian Engineering Services and it took 18 months after the exam before one got on-boarded. With time in hand, I joined C-DOT, the 'subsidiary' telecom R&D organization of DoT, which conceived and delivered the famous Rural Automatic Exchange revolutionizing India's rural telephony in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Research in telecom was fun, and C-DOT thrived on its radically different environment and ethos than the parent DoT. The team was younger, the timelines were tighter and there was a driving underlying mission to create and apply technology. Software development, especially for telecom, was a complex rigmarole of cross compilers, machine language coding and endless cycles of optimizing the real-time operating system. All this, to get to the dial tone on the 'make in India' telephone exchange which could stand the 'reliable grid challenged' and non-air conditioned high-dust environment of rural India. The world owes some of the brightest software and hardware engineering talent to C-DOT, the bulk of which was handpicked later by who's who of global telecom giants like Lucent, Motorola, Cisco, Nortel, Nokia, and Ericsson.