Why DIV tag not TABLE

By: Himanshu Poddar

Hi and Merry Christmas to All,

I am back and writting after long and really sorry for this.

Today after Christmas when i am really relax and looking forward to new year just decided to write here something interesting that is happening in industry i.e change of mindset of each and every organization to shift the layout design from table to table less design i.e. from <Table> to <DIV>.

When we in my company decided that from onwards we will be using <DIV> instead of table in our layouts, everyone asked only one question WHY and it was me and the designer were give the task of finding the answer to this big WHY as we had given this idea…lol.This is really nothing new, but rather a different way of doing things. Some pages you see around the internet do not contain any tables at all. Each section is a DIV area being positioned by CSS.

Note/Warning for all programmers: please don’t try designing the form or any layout done in DIV by yourself without asking the designers till you have good knolwdge of DIV and CSS as we been doing till today with tables (sometimes), it is because this way you will really spoil the design and yes your dear friend The Designer may lose temper.

Here is some of the reason why one should use DIV instead of tables till possible.

Tables are slow

In almost every browser out there, unless table widths are specified explicitly, all the text in the table needs to be rendered before the browser can figure out how wide to make the various table cells. This means that pages load slowly. Note that using CSS for layout doesn’t necessarily help here, since there’s the same problem if the widths aren’t specified explicit. I’m guilty of this myself.Tables don’t have to be slow if you put each row in a separate table, but then you lose the alignment between rows. For a blog, that may not be much of a problem, but for data that actually wants to be in tabular form, it’s still a problem.Simply speaking just think how much time each <td> takes at the background when page is loaded (think if u have big form and have around 50 <td>).

Tables can be inflexible

One of the common tricks to make tables load more quickly is to specify the widths for all the table columns. This means that the table renders pretty quickly, and the user can see your text right away. The problem is that you’ve just specified the width for the page. Again, note that you can have this exact same problem with CSS if you specify all the widths explicitly.

Accessibility issues are easier with CSS

Tables also mean you have to present the information in the same order you want it displayed. You have to present data in the left column before the columns to the right. Using CSS for layout, you can present the data in a logical order and use CSS to control the appearance. For example, in a three-column layout using tables, you’ll see left-column then center column then right column in that order. Using CSS, you can put whichever of the three columns is most important first, and keep the layout separate (which is the whole point of CSS). A real important point that I missed on the first pass. I don’t know what I was thinking .

Tables don’t degrade

The most important reason why using tables for layout is that they don’t degrade gracefully. For a good example of this, take a look at any page on any site in Table layout. If your browser window is wide enough, you get a nice, two-column layout, just the way U intended. But if you’re using a narrower browser window, the page falls down to a single column with what used to be on the right down below the more important part of the page (or at least what I think is more important to most people). Tables don’t let the page degrade gracefully, and that’s their biggest problem.

Tables don’t print as well

A huge problem with tables (pointed out by a reader, this is another one I missed on the first pass) is that they don’t print terribly well. With CSS, you can use a print style sheet to give another look to the page. This style sheet can also include page-breaks that are under your control. You can also have elements that only show up when rendered to a screen, but not to a printer (headers and footers, for example).

Just remembered to say yes also…mmmmm….Div is lighter then the aaaaa…Table…yes now I remember what I was missing in the second point…..thanks to all.

Oracle 11g New Features

Oracle 11g Launched

By Sandip Davda

On 11^th July 17, 2007 Oracle today introduced Oracle(r) Database 11g, the latest release of the world’s most popular database. With more than 400 features, 15 million test hours, and 36,000 person-months of development, Oracle Database 11g is the most innovative and highest quality software product Oracle have ever announced. 

However actual product will be released in August 2007 on Linux Platform. As of now the release date for Windows and other platform is not decided. So you need to wait before you get your hands on Oracle 11g  -  the most eagerly awaited product…

Oracle Database 11g can help organizations take control of their enterprise information, gain better business insight, and quickly and confidently adapt to an increasingly changing competitive environment. To do this, the new release extends Oracle’s unique database clustering, data center automation, and workload management capabilities. With secure, highly available and scalable grids of low-cost servers and storage, Oracle customers can tackle the most demanding transaction processing, data warehousing, and content management applications.

Real Application Testing Helps Reduce Time, Risk and Cost of Change 

Oracle Database 11g features advanced self-management and automation features to help organizations meet service level agreements. For example, with organizations facing regular database and operating system software upgrades, and hardware and system changes, Oracle Database 11g introduces Oracle Real Application Testing, making it the first database to help customers test and manage changes to their IT environment quickly, in a controlled, cost effective manner.

Increase Return On Investment for Disaster Recovery Solutions 

In Oracle Database 11g, Oracle Data Guard enables customers to use their standby database to improve performance in their production environments as well as provide protection from system failures and site-wide disasters. Oracle Data Guard uniquely enables simultaneous read and recovery of a single standby database making it available for reporting, backup, testing and ‘rolling’ upgrades to production databases. By offloading workloads from production to a standby system, Oracle Data Guard helps enhance the performance of production systems and provides a more cost-effective disaster recovery solution.  

Enhanced Information Lifecycle Management and Storage Management 

Oracle Database 11g has significant new data partitioning and compression capabilities, for more cost-effective Information Lifecycle Management and storage management. Oracle Database 11g automates many manual data partitioning operations and extends existing range, hash and list partitioning to include interval, reference and virtual column partitioning. In addition, Oracle Database 11g provides a complete set of composite partitioning options, allowing storage management that is driven by business rules.  

Advanced Data Compression 

Building on its long-standing data compression capabilities, Oracle Database 11g offers advanced data compression for both structured and unstructured (LOB) data managed in transaction processing, data warehousing, and content management environments. Compression ratios of 2x to 3x or more for all data can be achieved with the new advanced compression capabilities in Oracle Database 11g.  

Total Recall of Data Changes 

The new release also features “Oracle Total Recall,” enabling administrators to query data in designated tables “as of” earlier times in the past. This offers an easy, practical way to add a time dimension to data for change tracking, auditing, and compliance.  

Maximum Availability of Information 

Oracle has consistently led the industry in protecting database applications from planned and unplanned downtime. Oracle Database 11g continues this lead by making it easier for administrators to meet their users’ availability expectations. New availability features include Oracle Flashback Transaction which makes it easy to back out a transaction made in error, as well as any dependent transactions; Parallel Backup and Restore which helps improve the backup and restore performance of very large databases; and ‘hot patching,’ which improves system availability by allowing database patches to be applied without the need to shut databases down. In addition, a new advisor – Data Recovery Advisor – helps administrators significantly reduce recovery downtime by automating problem investigation, intelligently determining recovery plan and handling multiple failure situations.  

Oracle Fast Files 

The next-generation capability for storing large objects (LOBs) such as images, large text objects, or advanced data types including XML, medical imaging, and three-dimensional objects – within the database. Oracle Fast Files offers database applications performance fully comparable to file systems. By storing a wider range of enterprise information and retrieving it quickly and easily, enterprises can know more about their business and adapt more rapidly. 

Faster XML

Oracle Database 11g includes significant performance enhancements to XML DB, a feature of Oracle database that enables customers to natively store, and manipulate XML data. Support for binary XML has been added offering customers a choice of XML storage options to match their specific application and performance requirements. XML DB also enables manipulation of XML data using industry standard interfaces with support for XQuery, Java Specification Requests (JSR)-170 and SQL/XML standards.

Transparent Encryption

Oracle Database 11g continues to build on its unmatched security capabilities through the addition of significant enhancements. The new release features improved Oracle Transparent Data Encryption capabilities beyond column level encryption. Oracle Database 11g offers tablespace encryption that can be utilized to encrypt entire tables, indexes, and other data storage. Encryption is also provided for LOBs stored in the database.

Embedded OLAP Cubes 

Oracle Database 11g also provides data warehousing innovations. OLAP cubes are enhanced to behave as materialized views in the database. This allows developers to use industry standard SQL for data query, but still benefit from the high performance delivered by an OLAP cube. New Continuous Query Notification features allow applications to be immediately notified when important changes are made to database data without burdening the database with constant polling.

Connection Pooling and Query Result Caches 

The performance and scalability features in Oracle Database 11g are designed to help organizations maintain a highly performant, scalable infrastructure to provide users’ with the best quality of service. Oracle Database 11g further enhances Oracle’s position as the industry’s performance and scalability leader with new features such as Query Result Caches which improves application performance and scalability by caching and reusing the results of often called database queries and functions in database and application tiers, and Database Resident Connection Pooling which improves the scalability of web-based systems by providing connection pooling for non-multi-threaded applications.

Enhanced Application Development 

Oracle Database 11g offers developers a choice of development tools, and a streamlined application development process that takes full advantage of key Oracle Database 11g features. These include new features such as Client Side Caching, Binary XML for faster application performance, XML processing, and the storing and retrieving of files. In addition, Oracle Database 11g also includes a new Java just-in-time Compiler to execute database Java procedures faster without the need for a third party compiler; native integration with Visual Studio 2005 for developing .NET applications on Oracle; Access migration tools with Oracle Application Express; and SQL Developer easy query building feature for fast coding of SQL and PL/SQL routines.

Enhanced Self-Management and Automation 

The manageability features in Oracle Database 11g are designed to help organizations easily manage enterprise grids and deliver on their users’ service level expectations. Oracle Database 11g introduces more self-management and automation that will help customers reduce their system management costs, while increasing performance, scalability, availability and security of their database applications. New manageability capabilities in Oracle Database 11g include Automatic SQL and memory tuning, a new Partitioning Advisor which automatically advises administrators on how to partition tables and indexes in order to improve performance, and enhanced performance diagnostics for database clusters. In addition, Oracle Database 11g includes a new Support Workbench which provides an easy-to-use interface that presents database health-related incidents to administrators along with information on how to quickly manage the resolution of incidents.  

Summary 

Oracle Database is the only database designed for grid computing. With the release of Oracle Database 11g, Oracle is making the management of enterprise information easier than ever; enabling customers to know more about their business and innovate more quickly. Oracle Database 11g delivers superior performance, scalability, availability, security and ease of management on a low-cost grid of industry standard storage and servers. Oracle Database 11g is designed to be effectively deployed on everything from small blade servers to the biggest SMP servers and clusters of all sizes. It features automated management capabilities for easy, cost-effective operation. Oracle Database 11g’s unique ability to manage all data from traditional business information to XML and 3D spatial information makes it the ideal choice to power transaction processing, data warehousing, and content management applications.

Giving SOAP a REST

Giving SOAP a REST

By Niraj Vadher

Many developers will be surprised to learn that SOAP isn’t the only game in town for Web services interfacing. REST offers a perfectly good solution for the majority of implementations, with greater flexibility and lower overhead. Developers need to stop reaching immediately for SOAP and start choosing the right technology for the application.

For the past two years, the hype surrounding the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) has barely waned, although its opponents have gradually risen in number. While some critics are simply tired of hearing about Web services, a small handful of Internet architects have come up with a surprisingly good argument for pushing SOAP aside: there’s a better method for building Web services in the form of Representational State Transfer (REST).

REST is more an old philosophy than a new technology. Whereas SOAP looks to jump-start the next phase of Internet development with a host of new specifications, the REST philosophy espouses that the existing principles and protocols of the Web are enough to create robust Web services. This means that developers who understand HTTP and XML can start building Web services right away, without needing any toolkits beyond what they normally use for Internet application development.

Interface Flexibility
The key to the REST methodology is to write Web services using an interface that is already well known and widely used: the URI. For example, exposing a stock quote service, in which a user enters a stock quote symbol to return a real-time price, could be as simple as making a script accessible on a Web server via the following URI: http://www.somebrokerage.com/quote?symbol=QQQ.

Any client or server application with HTTP support could easily call that service with an HTTP GET command. Depending on how the service provider wrote the script, the resulting HTTP response might be as simple as some standard headers and a text string containing the current price for the given ticker symbol. Or, it might be an XML document.

This interface method has significant benefits over SOAP-based services. Any developer can figure out how to create and modify a URI to access different Web resources. SOAP, on the other hand, requires specific knowledge of a new XML specification, and most developers will need a SOAP toolkit to form requests and parse the results.

Lighter on Bandwidth

Another benefit of the RESTful interface is that requests and responses can be short. SOAP requires an XML wrapper around every request and response. Once namespaces and typing are declared, a four- or five-digit stock quote in a SOAP response could require more than 10 times as many bytes as would the same response in REST.

SOAP proponents argue that strong typing is a necessary feature for distributed applications. In practice, though, both the requesting application and the service know the data types ahead of time; thus, transferring that information in the requests and responses is gratuitous.

How does one know the data types—and their locations in the response—ahead of time? Like SOAP, REST still needs a corresponding document that outlines input parameters and output data. The good part is that REST is flexible enough that developers could write WSDL files for their services if such a formal declaration was necessary. Otherwise, the declaration could be as simple as a human-readable Web page that says, “Give this service an input of some stock ticker symbol, in the format q=symbol, and it will return the current price of one share of stock as a text string.”

Security Safeguards

Probably the most interesting aspect of the REST vs. SOAP debate is the security angle. Although the SOAP camp insists that sending remote procedure calls through standard HTTP ports is a good way to ensure Web services support across organizational boundaries, REST followers argue that the practice is a major design flaw that compromises network safety. REST calls also go over HTTP or HTTPS, but with REST the administrator (or firewall) can discern the intent of each message by analyzing the HTTP command used in the request. For example, a GET request can always be considered safe because it can’t, by definition, modify any data. It can only query data.

A typical SOAP request, on the other hand, will use POST to communicate with a given service. And without looking into the SOAP envelope—a task that is both resource-consuming and not built into most firewalls—there’s no way to know whether that request simply wants to query data or delete entire tables from the database.

As for authentication and authorization, SOAP places the burden in the hands of the application developer. The REST methodology instead takes into account the fact that Web servers already have support for these tasks. Through the use of industry-standard certificates and a common identity management system, such as an LDAP server, developers can make the network layer do all the heavy lifting.

This is not only helpful to developers, but it eases the burden on administrators, who can use something as simple as ACL files to manage their Web services the same way they would any other URI.

Not For Everything

To be fair, REST isn’t the best solution for every Web service. Data that needs to be secure should not be sent as parameters in URIs. And large amounts of data, like that in detailed purchase orders, can quickly become cumbersome or even out of bounds within a URI. In these cases, SOAP is indeed a solid solution. But it’s important to try REST first and resort to SOAP only when necessary. This helps keep application development simple and accessible.

Fortunately, the REST philosophy is catching on with developers of Web services. The latest version of the SOAP specification now allows certain types services to be exposed through URIs (although the response is still a SOAP message). Similarly, users of Microsoft .NET platform can publish services so that they use GET requests. All this signifies a shift in thinking about how best to interface Web services.

Developers need to understand that sending and receiving a SOAP message isn’t always the best way for applications to communicate. Sometimes a simple REST interface and a plain text response does the trick—and saves time and resources in the process.

Google changing their Algorithm

By Sandip Davda

Google has just sent a report of a series of updates to their interface and algorithm, as they move towards what they call a “universal search model”.

With Google’s universal search, every time you conduct a search, Google checks across all of its search properties – web, image, video, news etc – and presents a single unified results page, that incorporates the most relevant content.

For example, a user searching for information on the Star Wars character Darth Vader is likely interested in all the information related to the character and the actor – not just web pages that mention the movie. Google will now deliver a single set of blended search results that include a humorous parody of the movie, images of the Darth Vader character, news reports on the latest Lucas film, as well as websites focused on the actor James Earl Jones – all ranked in order of relevance to the query. Users no longer have to visit several different Google search properties to find such a wide array of information on the topic.

Google’s new universal interface is certainly the boldest change by the search engine in many years, and the company is having to significantly upgrade its technology in order to support the new roll out.

Google is also in the process of deploying a new technical infrastructure that will enable the search engine to handle the computationally intensive tasks required to produce universal search results. The company is also releasing the first stage of an upgraded ranking mechanism that automatically and objectively compares different types of information. As always, Google(TM) search results are ranked automatically by algorithms to deliver the best results to users anywhere in the world.The level and speed of search innovation at Google has increased. Most of this innovation addresses basic ranking algorithms and is often not obvious to users. Users just see more accurate results, more often, in more languages, which is our primary goal

Changes in Navigation options Too….

In addition to the new algorithm, Google’s made changes to the navigation options, presenting new menu options “on the fly” depending on the type of search query

New dynamically generated navigation links have been added above the search results to suggest additional information that is relevant to a user’s query. For example, a search for “python” will now generate links to Google Blog Search(TM), Google Book Search(TM), Google Groups(TM), and Google Code(TM), to let the user know there is additional information on his or her query in each of those areas. As a result, users can find a wider array of information on their topic, including data types they might not have initially considered.

Google’s homepage and a number of applications have also been updated with a new navigation bar to provide easier access to popular Google products. Now, instead of having links above the Google.com homepage search box, users will see a navigation bar on the top left side of the page with various Google search properties and popular products including Gmail(TM), Google Calendar(TM), Google Docs & Spreadsheets(TM), and Picasa Web Albums(TM).

This is huge! Google’s basically telling users – and its competitors – that it has figured out how to identify the type of search query entered and provide a single set of results that it is confident will include all the information you could possibly want. While we’ve seen Google dip its toe in the water of predictive search – showing us images or stock prices – this overhaul of the search results page completely changes the way everyone interacts with Google.

Users will benefit, as they’ll likely find Google’s search results to be much more relevant, meanwhile seo services company will find that their job has become a lot more complex. Now, instead of focusing on web search and battling others for one of the coveted Top 10 spots for a particular search term, they’re going to find the Top 10 now includes results drawn from other indexes such as images, news and video. SEO’s will be faced with two choices. Stick with just web search, and be content that they may only have 5-6 opportunities to be in the Top 10 on Google, or, look at ways to optimize content such as photos, videos, news items, and use a broader approach to gaining page one exposure.

AJAX

By: Himanshu Poddar

Defining Ajax
Ajax isn’t a technology. It’s really several technologies, each flourishing in its own right, coming together in powerful new ways.

For practical implementation in asp.net you all can check this link http://techmanthan.wordpress.com/2007/05/29/ajax-implemetation/  

Ajax incorporates:

• standards-based presentation using XHTML and CSS;
• dynamic display and interaction using the Document Object Model;
• data interchange and manipulation using XML and XSLT;
• asynchronous data retrieval using XMLHttpRequest;
• and JavaScript binding everything together.

Instead of loading a webpage, at the start of the session, the browser loads an Ajax engine — written in JavaScript and usually tucked away in a hidden frame. This engine is responsible for both rendering the interface the user sees and communicating with the server on the user’s behalf. The Ajax engine allows the user’s interaction with the application to happen asynchronously — independent of communication with the server. So the user is never staring at a blank browser window and an hourglass icon, waiting around for the server to do something.

Web pages, unlike native applications, are loosely coupled, meaning that the data they display are not tightly bound to data sources and must be first marshalled (set out in proper order) into an HTML page format before they can be presented to a user agent on the client machine. For this reason, web pages have to be re-loaded each time a user needs to view different datasets. By using the XMLHttpRequest object to request and return data without a re-load, a programmer by-passes this requirement and makes the loosely coupled web page behave much like a tightly coupled application, but with a more variable lag time for the data to pass through a longer “wire” to the remote web browser.

Who’s Using Ajax

Google is making a huge investment in developing the Ajax approach. All of the major products Google has introduced over the last year — Orkut,Gmail, the latest beta version of Google Groups, Google Suggest, and Google Maps — are Ajax applications. (For more on the technical nuts and bolts of these Ajax implementations, check out these excellent analyses of Gmail, Google Suggest, and Google Maps.) Others are following suit: many of the features that people love in Flickr depend on Ajax, and Amazon’s A9.com search engine applies similar techniques.

Advantages of Ajax

1. User interface

Pages using Ajax behave more like a standalone application than a typical web page. Clicking on links that cause the entire page to refresh feels like a “heavy” operation. With Ajax, the page often can be updated dynamically, allowing a faster response to the user’s interaction.

2. Bandwidth usage

By generating the HTML locally within the browser, and only bringing down JavaScript calls and the actual data, Ajax web pages can appear to load relatively quickly since the payload coming down is much smaller in size. In addition to “load on demand” of contents, some web-based applications load stubs of event handlers and then load the functions on the fly. This technique significantly cuts down the bandwidth consumption for web applications that have complex logic and functionality.

Disadvantages

1. Browser integration

The dynamically created page does not register itself with the browser history engine, so triggering the “Back” function of the users’ browser might not bring the desired result. Solutions to this can involve using invisible IFRAMEs to invoke changes that populate the history used by a browser’s back button. Google Maps, for example, performs searches in an invisible IFRAME and then pulls results back into an element on the visible web page.

2. Response-time concerns

Network latency — or the interval between user request and server response — needs to be considered carefully during Ajax development. Without clear feedback to the user, smart preloading of data and proper handling of the XMLHttpRequest object, users might experience delay in the interface of the web application, something which they might not expect or understand.

3. Reliance on JavaScript

Ajax relies on JavaScript, which may be implemented differently by different browsers or versions of a particular browser. Because of this, sites that use JavaScript may need to be tested in multiple browsers to check for compatibility issues. It’s not uncommon to see a JavaScript code written twice, one part for IE, another part for Mozilla compatibles. (see also Cross-platform web design). The level of IDE support for JavaScript is exceptionally poor.

4. Web analytics

Many web analytics solutions are based on the paradigm of a new page being loaded whenever new or updated content is displayed to the user, or to track a series of steps in a process such as a check-out. Since Ajax alters this process, care must be taken to account for how to instrument a page or a portion of a page so that it can be accurately tracked.

 

4G…. Changing Mobile Communication

Know More About…4G

By Manu Agrawal

We haven’t seen 3G yet, but we’ve been told India might leapfrog directly to 4G!!!

Technologies in communication systems keep changing. You’ve probably come across “2G,” “3G,” and “4G.” But what does “G” mean anyway? Put simply, “G” is “Generation”—it refers to the generations of evolution of wireless communication systems. The first generation, 1G, was based on voice-only analogue cellular systems; the second generation (2G) on digital transmission technologies; and 3G focused on integration of voice, data and multimedia transmissions at greater speeds.

Different Views And Definitions

As we move towards this, the next generation of wireless communication, there is much difference in opinion on what 4G exactly will be and consist of. A number of different definitions and views on 4G have been put forth by different companies and countries! It is, therefore, difficult to give you a definition, as it were, of 4G.The International Telecomm-unications Union (ITU) defines 4G technology as providing data-transfer rates of 1 Gbps when stationary and 100 Mbps in a mobile environment. Japan’s NTT DoCoMo has introduced the concept of “MAGIC” in its vision for 4G: “Mobile multimedia; Anytime, anywhere; Global mobility support; Integrated wireless solution; and Customised personal service.”

According to the European Commission, 4G would ensure seamless mobile services across an intermeshed web of wireless systems and networks—from private to public, indoor to wide-area. 4G will probably be a convergence of technologies that would allow seamless communication via broa-dband over wireless networks using the best available network (wireless LAN, radio, TV broadcasts, or satellite).

The ITU has dubbed 4G as “3G and beyond.” There is still a cloud of confusion, though, about the definition… but at least we know what 3G is, so:

The Problems With 3G

The third generation of wireless communication technologies aimed at supporting voice, data, and multimedia over wireless networks with higher transmission speeds. There were limitations and difficulties that 3G failed to overcome: the difficulty of moving across different wireless networks seamlessly, the limitations of the spectrum and its allocation, and data and multimedia transport at high speeds between fixed networks and sub-networks.The fourth generation has been touted as being able to overcome these limitations by improvement in areas of wireless networks, with regards to capacity, bandwidth, mobility, wider area coverage capacity, and service properties—categories, cost, and quality.

What Does 4G Promise?

The major change with the deployment of 4G will be wider broadband for mobile wireless communication. This generation focuses on optimised transmission of multimedia content through seamless networks covering wide areas. It will also support fixed wireless networks in addition to other cellular services.By integrating existing technologies with emerging advanced technologies, 4G will offer broader bandwidth, smooth and quick transport of data and multimedia over a large number of wireless devices and networks, and quicker transfer of data/call in progress from one network to another without a communication break.

According to industry experts and researchers, 4G networks would provide transmission rates of up to 100 Mbps in stationary conditions, and up to 20 Mbps at 100 miles an hour! This means that an entire CD can be sent across in a minute!

In future 4G infrastructures, IPv6-based (refer Know More About IPv6, Digit, October 2006) network architectures will support a large number of wireless communication devices and will be used as a common protocol by various sets of networks for Internet access over wide areas. IP-based systems will offer an end-to-end state of data transmission with minimal data packet loss.There are, in this, the fourth generation, a lot of technologies and standards that will be competing: WiMAX, WiBro (Wireless Broadband), and more to come.

Deployment

The deployment of WiMAX (802.16e) as the next generation 4G technology platform was announced by Sprint Nextel with support from Intel, Motorola, and Samsung earlier this year. NTT DoCoMo is actively experimenting on the packet speed transmission and further developments in 4G technologies. Its deployment worldwide is expected after 2010, with the assumption that 3G networks and technologies will have been successfully deployed.According to Dayanidhi Maran, our Minister of Communications and IT, third-generation technologies have certain limitations, and would not prove to be cost-effective. He therefore announced, in 2004, a plan for the country to leapfrog to 4G. It’s absolutely unpredictable what technologies might evolve until 4G is actually implemented, and how it will be. At present, industry experts and developers propose it as a convergence of technologies, such as a combination of WiMAX and WiFi.