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C H A N D I G A R H U N P L U G G E D

Wireless City

Gulveen Aulakh CHANDIGARH 17 JANUARY

FROM being the most wired city in India, Chandigarh is taking that unplugged plunge. Mavens of the UT administration has told ET that the city could well be the first in India to be completely wireless-enabled. And if that happens anytime soon Chandigarh would be rubbing shoulders with the likes of San Francisco and Philadelphia that are undergoing Wi Fi transition by June 2006.
“Wireless technology is the future. We’re looking into making the entire city wireless enabled,” said Mr Vivek Atray, director, IT and Tourism in Chandigarh. As per administration sources, eight companies including Tropos Networks, WirelessTech, Intel and IBM have been doing the rounds with proposals and demonstrations.
In India only select areas like campuses and hotels have been Wi Fi enabled so far. Mysore, for example, has acquired the Wi Fi status recently with three access points in the city though the entire city does not have wireless connectivity. “The University of Pune, with its mesh wireless technology, is the first one to adopt the same technology as is used in pockets of New Orleans. They have received it very well. This encouraged us to present the technology to the upcoming cities like Chandigarh, while our next target could be Ludhiana,” as per Mr Victor Law, MD (Asia Pacific), for Singapore based Tropos Networks.
Like Rome, New York and Hong Kong, pockets in Chandigarh including Hotel Taj, Hotel Mountview and Punjab Engineering College are already Wi Fi enabled. In addition to this, industry insiders peg the collective figure for number of broadband users in the city at 20,000 with numbers increasing every month. This may be a pointer for an entire city to come under the wireless networking umbrella.
Secondly, with the CTP becoming the flagship of the tech sector in the region the obvious sense is to cater to the upcoming PC and laptop boom by providing a steady subscriber flow like wireless. Further evidence is provided by the surging laptop sales in the city. Top-notch laptop vendors like HCL Infosystems, Wipro Infotech, Acer, IBM et al have registered staggering growth in their laptop sales in the city. Agreed Mr Ashish Mittal from HCL Infosystems, “The laptop sales in Chandigarh have gone drastically high. Though we entered the market late in the year, we have sold more than 200 laptops in Chandigarh alone.” With the drop in prices, the sales have gone up to 10,000 for a single established vendor in the city. According to Amit Goel, Accounts Manager, Wipro Infotech, “The laptop market has grown by 400% during the past year in the UT.”
Another pointer is that for a wireless city the geographical boundaries need to be fixed just like a campus. In those lines, Chandigarh seems to fit the bill completely as the city is still on a small scale and not at as spread out as the metros. The installation charges were close to Rs 70 lakh for the Wi Fi-enabled Pune campus. If the comparisons are made correctly, for a city like Chandigarh, the expenses could go up to up to many crores, an estimate which the administration is keeping close to its chest. However, companies who are hawking the technology consider the city as a viable option. “We came to Chandigarh because we feel that the city can make the investment required to have an entire city connected by wireless,” said Mr Stephen Kwan, MD, WirelessTech.
A Wi Fi (for smaller areas) or Wimax (for larger areas like cities) system only works where there are a good number of users subscribing to the service and a specific revenue model being designed for the subscribers. The likes of Mysore pay Rs 750 a month, irrespective of the kind of data download and internet is available round the clock.
UT is likely to follow a plan for the revenue model where regular registration similar to broadband service will be present for residents. Whereas visitors would avail of a temporary password set up and would pay by credit cards online.