Originally appeared in the Saint Paul Pioneer Press

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My Life Among Dogs

The big news last week was about Project Abilene, the pilot project that would boost Internet transmission speeds up to 1000 times. Already, net-worthies are grumbling that the high-speed prototype is being rolled out first to research universities, and not to them.

Hey, people. I have been corresponding for the past month with a gentleman from Bombay who would commit high crimes to have the ordinary dial-up service we experience, waits and all.

His name is O.P. Kharbanda, and he is, like me, a business writer, having authored some 30 books on project management, disaster response, and other topics, including What Made Gertie Gallop? Lessons from Project Failures, co-authored with Jeffrey Pinto .

In fact, I would paste the label of management guru on him, except that the word guru seems suddenly very provincial. But at 74, he is of an age to have accumulated some wisdom. He signs his email Om - because that is his name.

Dr. Kharbanda's complaint is that he can't be a full player in the online revolution because the infrastructure where he is won't let him.

"My system is admittedly not the latest," he writes. "I have a 486 PC with 16 megabytes of RAM, a 200-megabyte hard disk, CD-ROM, and 2400 baud modem. I run DOS, though I can run Windows 3.1 as well. I connect to the Internet via pine (email) and lynx (a text-based browser)."

So when I invited Dr. Kharbanda to visit my web site, he really couldn't. Lynx, a miracle four years ago, is a poor way to grapple with the multimedia offerings of today's WWW. And the phone connections he relies on in Bombay are poor. Many disconnects, lots of line noise, and nowhere near enough fiber optic. It's not a tin can on a string, but it's not a T1 line, either.

Though the middle class in India is rapidly discovering and delighting in the Internet, the experience remains substandard. There is only one official ISP, the overburdened, government-sponsored Videsh Sankar Nigam Ltd. Only a dozen metro areas have service, and so far only a few thousand customers are enrolled at each. Without infrastructure, there's only so much you can do.

Because communications are crummy, Dr. Kharbanda has been unable to police his work the way authors in the U.S. do. When he finally was able to contact Amazon.com, for instance, they had no clue who he was, despite having about 20 of his books, most of them covered with the cobwebs of neglect, on their list. Even his publishers, owing to the departure of editors and the acquisition of whole houses, weren't quite sure who he was.

Anyway, I have decided to put Dr. Kharbanda's writing back on the map. Starting today, he has a Web site, backboned onto mine, at http://mfinley.com/kharbanda.htm. I'm going to see if I can teach him how to send me a photo of himself via pine. If you're into project management, give his page a look.

And on the subject of Net connections in developing nations, you must know about Muhammad Yunus, a most remarkable man. Dr. Yunus is an economist who has spent the last 20 years trying to lift Bangla Desh up from poverty. First he created Grameen Bank, a bank dedicated to making very small loans. Dr. Yunus's bank lends business start-up sums as small as $15 to the poorest people in the world -- money to buy a cow, work tools, or a hand loom.

He came up with the idea of "loan groups." Everyone in the group is lent money, with the understanding that if one of the group fails to repay, no group member can borrow again. The system works - its 98% payback rate is vastly superior to Visa's or American Express's.

Then Dr. Yunus spun off into telecommunications. He created a phone company, putting cell phones into distant villages, sometimes just one phone per village, so no one is entirely cut off from instant communication.

But his latest idea is the most marvelous. He discovered his country's railroads have fiber optic cable buried under their tracks, so that the trains can communicate. The cable is vastly underused. Yunus hopes to put this underused cable to work giving his dirt-poor country overnight one of the world's most advanced high-bandwidth Internet connections!

I learned about Dr. Yunus from one of our own management gurus, James F. Moore , during a recent visit to Minnesota. You can read a tribute to the career of Dr. Yunus.

Each of these men is a hero to me. Dr. Kharbanda, for being eager to learn and undertake big new projects at a goodly age, despite the disadvantages of bad technology. And Dr. Yunus, for showing that the brightest visions can occur where least expected.

The rest of you, complaining about your 56k modems stuck at 33.6k - shaddup!

America's Best-Loved Technology Writer(TM), Michael Finley has a free gift for visitors to http://mfinley.com.