WI-FI: Crown for Royal City

This Dusshera festive season, Mysore became the only city in India to become completely Wi-Fi enabled. The entire city area spanning 130 sq km has gone wireless. The Mysore 'hot zone' was made possible by the efforts of a local ISP called WIFyNet, which has erected three towers at different corners of the city. Karnataka's IT and BT secretary Shankaralinge Gowda inaugurated the wireless service on 11 October. This makes Mysore the only city in the world, apart from Jerusalem, to boast of such a feat.

According to Shankar Prasad, WIFyNet director, "We wanted to showcase this technology in Mysore and hope to replicate this model in other cities in India." A central tower, which acts as a central access point, and two other towers form the framework of the wireless infrastructure. Each tower costs around Rs 20 lakh and this investment has been borne by the company. The 108 Mbps network runs on a secure WEP (wired equivalent privacy) protocol.

Wi-Fi gets off the ground in Mysore. Shankarlinge Gowda, secretary for IT and BT, Govt of Karnataka along with Dhananjaya, director (technical), JSS Maha Vidyapeeta, Mysore doing the honors. He is flanked by WifiyNet director, Shankar Prasad and company executives

To log on to the Wi-Fi network, individuals pay an installation deposit of Rs 7,000 that covers access hardware like USB access device, PCI card with external antenna, or an outdoor bridge (in case signals are weak). In addition users pay a monthly rental of around Rs 900.

Corporate users can avail of suitable plans depending on the required bandwidth by signing a QoS agreement with WIFyNet. The service provider would then install a directional antenna to assure the requisite signal strength and throughput. Prasad said that the service is slowly but surely gaining traction among enterprises in Mysore. "We are servicing a medical transcription company called Ezmed for which non-stop Internet is mission critical to their operations."

Next on the radar is Kushalnagar in Coorg, located in hilly terrain and a potential hub due to a Tibetan monastery and a huge tourist inflow. Prasad said, "We plan to build south India's longest Internet link spanning 96 kms from Mysore to Kushalnagar. Providing Wi-Fi capabilities in a tough terrain like Coorg would be an excellent technology showcase." WIFyNet, which is a registered ISP in Mysore, is trying to migrate its subscribers from wired to wireless Internet. "Right now, we have around 50 active subscribers and plan to increase to a 1,000 by March 2005," informed Prasad. He added that the number of towers would be increased as the user base went up. "Right now, around 80 percent of the city is covered," he said.

WIFyNet is trying to sign on local engineering colleges, medical transcription companies, and software companies for the service and is ambitious about its plans to take Wi-Fi to other cities. "We want to go for a franchisee business model and will initially look at the south Indian market. We will start looking for suitable business partners starting December this year," Prasad said.

Mysore's big Wi-Fi leap comes as the Karnataka government is promoting the city as a favorable secondary destination for IT companies after the capital hub of Bangalore.

Priya Padmanabhan, CyberMedia News

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