Cell Phone Nation: How Mobile Phones Have Revolutionized Business, Politics and Ordinary Life in India Read Free Page A

Mosazai, Nimmi Rangaswamy, Abhishek Sinha, Deepali Sharma, Sirpa Tenhunen, Zhang Weiyu and Ayesha Zainudeen.
    From Doron, special thanks go to Ajay ‘Pinku’ Pandey whose ongoing assistance in translation, interviews and friendship proved as invaluable as ever. Others who offered their time and assistance in India include Pradeep Manjhi, Nitya Pandey, Deepak Sahani, Rakesh Singh, Ravi Varma, Samir Singh, Sumit Churasia, Dr A. B. Singh, and Vimal Mehra. Jeffrey is indebted to T. K. Basu, T. V. Ramachandran, Bobby Sebastian,Gopal Srinivasan, P. Vijayan and T. Willington for connections, directions and instructive conversations. Both of us have benefited from the advice of Anshuman Tiwari.
    The people we have named so far do not include dozens of Controllers, Connectors and Consumers of the cell phone who talked to us in settings varying from the slick corporate offices of Oberoi Garden City, Mumbai, to the busy stalls of Daal Mandi, Banaras, or palm-shaded tower sites around Kochi. Some of these debts are recorded in the footnotes. Ourgratitude to so many patient, informative and entertaining people is immense.

RADIO FREQUENCY AND MOBILE PHONES
    A radio wave is an electricity-driven spurtof energy. Think of the ripples a stone makes when it falls into a pond. A big stone makes big ripples—with long gaps between each one; a small stone makes small ripples that are closer together.
    This is where the term ‘radio frequency’ comes in—how close together, or how frequent, are the electro-magnetic waves that a transmitter spurts out. Old-fashioned AM radio works at frequencies between 535 and 1700 kilohertz. That means the signal or wave oscillates at between 535,000 and 1.7 million cycles every second. If a radio station is assigned a particular frequency (say, 621 kilohertz), people with receivers tune their receivers to pick up only radio signals bumping along at 621 kHz.
    AM radio uses relatively low frequencies because that was what the technology was capable of producing when broadcast radio became possible after the First World War. Advances in technology have brought the ability to transmit at higher frequencies—more oscillations per second—and therefore to pack more information into each time interval because each interval contains a larger number of cycles.
    Because the range of Radio Frequency (RF) suitable for economic and technological exploitation is finite, there have been national and international agreements since the 1920s about what sorts of uses, and which organisations, may operate on particular frequencies. For example, 2.402 GHz and 2.480 GHz (that is, 2.402 billion and 2.480 billion cycles per second) are set aside for industrial, scientific and medical devices (ISM). For most of us, these are the frequencies that operate garage doorsand Bluetooth. These devices are driven by only tiny amounts of energy so their signal does not travel very far—only 10 or 15 yards or metres—and they therefore do not travel ten blocks away to interfere with someone else’s garage door.
    Increasing refinement of how you can slice RF spectrum—how you can populate the radio waves with information—led to the first mobile phones and to the continuing refinements since the 1990s.
    Because usable RF is limited, and users of mobile phones now number billions, you need to use the same frequencies over and over again in different geographic locations. Signals therefore have to be relatively weak. That’s why India needs 400,000 cell phone towers to pick up signals from friendly towers and re-send them to other friendly towers nearby.
    That’s also why we talk about ‘cell’ phones. Each telephone tower covers a ‘cell’, a geographic unit which the telecom company has marked out (usually about 10 square miles or 26 square kilometres). The tower in one cell passes on signals to towers in neighbouring cells, and a phone stays connected to the network even as we travel. (It also means that the network, or the