Caltiger.com to offer free Internet access

P>BANGALORE: Calcutta-based Internet service provider (ISP) Caltiger.com is offering free Internet access. The subscribers will have to pay only for the telephone call charges for the duration of surfing the Internet.

According to Caltiger.com vice president strategic partnerships Jay Kumar, Caltiger.com, a property of Patriot Automation Projects Ltd., is planning to launch its services in Bangalore and Mumbai soon. For getting connected to free access, a subscriber will have to download the free installer after visiting the site (www.caltiger.com) and once the software is downloaded, the same would automatically get installed in the subscriber's computer, Mr Kumar added.

Besides, one can also call a company agent to load the software and register on- line. Once the registration procedure is complete, the user is given a user name and a password. Company chief operating officer Bangalore - ISP Sudipto Gupta said India's first free ISP is technologically well backed with 60 Alpha servers in place of which six of them would be kept aside for Bangalore. He also added, with more bandwidth possible and inter-city connectivity likely to be effected soon, the company would be in a position to handle up to one million subscribers.

Mr Kumar said the company plans to extend this free service to other cities like Jamshedpur, Guwahati and Siliguri. He said the same service would be made available to include other cities like Hyderabad, Chennai, Kochi, New Delhi, Chandigarh, Ahmedabad, Baroda and Pune during the next round of expansion. Mr Kumar said in addition to providing for dial-up PSTN services to subscribers, the ISP company also plans to offer other corporate services like web hosting, VPN services to corporate houses. Besides, the company would offer to extend a suite of e-commerce solutions as part of its tie-up with PricewaterhouseCoopers. Mr Kumar said the company would be investing close to Rs 100 crore on providing this free service. However, he said the company had not decided on whether to go for a listing in the country or an overseas listing.