Out of curiosity, how's the quality of the landlines in India? In the US, practically every household has access to a landline, regardless of how far out in the backwoods they live or how poor they are. US telecoms networks have built/maintained a physical network (with five nines of up-time!) across a huge geographic span for about 100 years.
I'm not saying that telcoms haven't squandered their profits to some extent. And it makes me sick to think about how they've abused their subsidies on the backs of the taxpayers. But anyone who's ever had to modernize a corporate LAN/WAN, or refactor an app written in a dead language knows how much, much easier it is to move quicker and cheaper if you don't already have a legacy platform to worry about. I can't imagine how much inertia a hundred year-old system has.
Just as art is hollow when the artist cares only about money...
While romantic-sounding, what does that really mean? The world is filled with art (much of it famous) that was created by really talented artists trying to put food on the table. In fact, I can't think of a better motivator to produce good-quality art than the prospect of becoming another "starving artist." Michelangelo absolutely hated painting the Sistine Chapel ceiling. He was a sculptor and only did the frescos after being hounded into by the Pope. He complained incessantly about not having as much creative control as he wished over the project, about his aches and pains of doing uncomfortable work, the papacy rushing him, etc.
It was from the RAND study that the false rumor started claiming that the ARPANET was somehow related to building a network resistant to nuclear war. This was never true of the ARPANET, only the unrelated RAND study on secure voice considered nuclear war. However, the later work on Internetting did emphasize robustness and survivability, including the capability to withstand losses of large portions of the underlying networks.
"A Brief History of the Internet", Internet Society.
pagerank has been around for a long time and it hasn't altogether changed much.
PageRank (the patented ranking algorithm that put Google on the map) may not have changed much in the past decade. However Google has a $2.1B annual R&D budget. PageRank is only one of many, many tools in their toolbox. IIRC, a webpage's ranking in their search results is determined by around 400 different variables--PageRank being just one.
A hobby of mine is woodworking. One piece of invaluable equipment is a jointer which is used for putting a parallel face or edge on a board. Along with a planer, a jointer is used to ensure that the boards are straight and square. It resembles a long table with a gap in the middle that contains a rotating cutter head.
While jointers produced today have newer bells-and-whistles, the machines produced 60+ years ago are generally considered superior and are highly sought after. This is primarily because they were made of solid cast iron, which is heaver and absorbs vibration better than the stamped steel machines made now (vibration is the enemy of smooth cuts). They also last forever and are rather easy to maintain since being able to easily fix your own equipment was more of a concern than the price tag back then.
There's also a similar situation with vintage Stanley hand planes and other woodworking tools. It's not simply a sense of nostalgia either. These old tools are genuinely better than most off-the-shelf stuff on today's market. I wonder if we'll ever look back on computers in the same way?
"Show business is just like high school, except you get paid." - Martin Mull