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I still remember that day. I returned back to my room after laboring hard for three hours in my finance paper. It was really tough or at least seemed to me. I switched on my computer and logged into Yahoo Messenger hoping to find some friend online for a very much-needed relaxing chat. It took a few seconds to log in, and along with it also opened a window displaying the offline messages, some 35 of them. As I glanced over those messages, I realized that in the heat of exams, I had actually forgotten my own birthday. Nothing could have been a better balm to get rid of that pain of failure than finding all those messages.

There is no doubt that in a very few years, Internet has changed the communications forever, but has it all been for the better?

The growth of the Internet as a communication medium can be attributed to its low cost. I still remember how costly and cumbersome it used to be to interact with a far-placed person before the e-mails were introduced. But is cost benefit the only thing that Internet has come along with for its users? Definitely NO. It has brought with it marginal performance, unreliability, low value and lack of security - the very reasons, which restrict its application to meet the user’s needs.

What is needed is a new type of public network that provides the flexibility of the Internet, but that moves beyond today’s Internet ‘quality’. What is needed is a public network that is not just ubiquitous, but also predictable, flexible and secure.

What is needed is a network that allows user to: -