"Affordable technology can bring about broadband revolution"

BANGALORE: Does India have the potential to latch on to the broadband revolution and reach the 50 million connections in five years? The answer is yes, according to IIT Madras electrical engineering department professor Dr Ashok Jhunjhunwalla, who addressed delegates at the Texas Instruments (TI) Developers conference in Bangalore.

To achieve this target, he urged the industry to tackle bottlenecks like expensive international network and backbone network costs and high cost of access devices like PCs, which cost around Rs 20,000-30,000. "We need affordable technology (around Rs 7,000) to suit the Indian market and one should not depend on the West to deliver these solutions," he opined.

On technologies like Wimax and Wi-Fi, Dr Jhunjhunwalla was of the opinion that getting over the hype is very important. "The infrastructure costs and reuse costs of WI-Max is very high and there is also the question of how it can work with 2.5 G/3G cellular technologies," he added.


Besides focusing on services and international markets, he exhorted developers to have an inward focus and try to tap the 6,00,000 villages in India. "Any technology that is introduced in India should scale even in rural areas," he said.

IIT Madras' TeNet Group (telecommunications and computer networking) consisting of researchers and faculty members is working towards creating such affordable technologies. One of its groups called n-Logue has installed Internet kiosks in 1500 villages at a cost of $ 1,000 per kiosk. "Villagers are able to get services like agriculture, veterinary consultancy and health care online," Dr Jhunjhunwalla said.

Similarly, he said, the Midas group has developed a disruptive broadband cable wireless solution that delivers downstream on cable and upstream on wireless through a modem.

Earlier, TI India chief Bobby Mithra said, "Customers these days are not looking just for the silicon but also applications on top of it and they want this when the microarchitecture of the chip is being defined." To address this paradigm shift, he urged developers to come up with compelling solutions to synchronize the way silicon and software function.