Communication - Telephone

Hope the previous issue must have rekindled your own associated memories of your life....

We have also come across Telephones, starting with trunk call booking. In this process, we used to book a call with post office by giving the city and the number to be connected. Getting connected to this trunk call was a huge process with lot of waiting time. One would never move away from Telephone, for the simple reason, that you my get connected any time. There was no definite waiting time. Slowly, that was replaced by STD, which was amazing thing again. All you had to do was to dial the number prefixed by appropriate STD code and you get connected.

During STD days, when telephone was not there in home, serving at different stations, one had to wait in queue for long, to get our turn to contact their near and dear. There were full rate, half rate and one fourth rate prevailing till 2001, I think. So the maximum crowd who wanted to communicate will invariably come after 9 PM to avail the one fourth rates. Those days the charges were astronomically high at Rs 30 per minute…

It was even more difficult, when we have served in remote places. There would be only one STD booth in a radius of 3 Km. If you got connected in the first instance, after waiting for long, you were as lucky as winner of a lottery. You were allowed to make three attempts and if you could not get connected, you would have come back at the rear of the line to give others, their chance.

I remember, having my first mobile in Aug 2004 (recently replaced with a touch phone) and this was a great bonanza. Talking to near and dear was a cakewalk. Gone are those days where we would have waited for hours in queue to speak. Even we were able to text messages, as call charges were around Rs 5 per minute. Though, the charges have greatly come down from Rs 30 to Rs 5, we were very conservative in using mobile phones. Questions like “Do you have a pre-paid or post paid connection?”, “Who is your service provider?”, “What are the tariff charges?”, were very common. In Sep 2005, I bought my second mobile (lost it in Oct 2009) with a different connection.

By 2007, the tariff has drastically come down to almost Rs 1.50. Having individual mobiles, has become a necessity at that point of time. Earlier, when we were sending our family alone from a remote station to hometown, you could get a confirmation of reaching safely, was only after two/three days of journey….  Now what happens, even the individual would have not crossed 100 metres from home. There will be a call informing that you have forgotten something. Take the case of travel from Mumbai to Pune, a distance of 192 Km which takes about 210 minutes. There would be at least 6 - 10 calls / SMS made during this travel. “have taken the auto/ local train”, “have reached the station”. “boarded the Express Train and sat comfortably”, “have reached Karjat”, “crossed Lonavla”, “reached Khadki and got down from the train”, “taken auto to home”, “Reached home”. Communication is being used left, right and centre.

With the call charges costing us 1 paisa per second these days, this is inevitable. The technology has advanced; tariff has come down, with STD becoming indifferent and at par with local calls….

Shall we see Emails, voice and video chat, Macro and micro blogging in the next issue……

To be continued….