Wireless LAN at Indian Business School soon

NEW DELHI: Amongst the many firsts to its credit, the Indian Business School

(IBS) can now boast of its wireless LAN (WLAN) network. The second phase of the

network would be inaugurated by Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee, on December

2, when the campus of 250 acres will go live. The first phase of the network has

been operational since June this year.

With the infrastructure in place, students can log onto the network from

anywhere, be it at the pool-side, the gym or by the lake. The logic of the

facility being that while at work the creativity of students should not be

curtailed. They can sit in groups to do their projects anywhere in the campus by

just inserting the LAN card in the laptops.

The difficult working process is actually simplified by wise use of

technology. The WLAN involves setting up of a network of access points across

the campus to catch signals from the nearest laptop. Each laptop has two LAN

cards, which are for the two central switches so that if one of the central

switches fails the other takes over. This creates inherent redundancy in the

network so that it is "always on". These signals are transmitted at

2.4 MHz, which requires government clearance. This frequency is free in other

countries but comes at a cost in India. It requires a one time payment of Rs

18,000 and thereafter an annual fee of Rs 2000-3000 per user.

Each access point can support up to 40 users logging in simultaneously. So

far 150 WLAN cards have been distributed amongst users. The campus has a

fiber-optic cable network in place. It has 1 Mbps connectivity, which is

expected to be scaled up to 2 Mbps.

Says Vivek Mahajan, director, Infotech Network, who implemented the project,

"The networking project itself was about Rs 8 crore and the WLAN part of

the project was about Rs 40 lakh. But what is significant is that this is the

first instance of WLAN in an academic institute."

The WLAN market is waiting to explode in the country. Although India is slow

in adopting new technology, there is a pent-up need for such technology since it

enables corporations to be independent of service providers within cities,

resulting in greater reliability in their networks. Industry estimates place the

size of the Indian market in the current year at $0.1 million, which is expected

to grow at a CAGR of 80 per cent to be $10 million market by 2006.