The Hindu Business Line : `Unwired Bangalore' by 2008?

Imagine checking your mail from the laptop while sitting unplugged in a park, hotel, home terrace, or virtually anywhere. All this should be possible by 2008, when Bangaloreans will have broadband connectivity at virtually any corner of the city. The Department of IT & BT calls this the ultimate step towards transforming the city as the IT destination.

The Government will not invest in the three-phase `Unwired Bangalore' project but will act as a facilitator to bring service providers together. "We have issued an expression of interest and hope to see the results in six months' time," Mr M.K. Shankaralinge Gowda, IT & BT Secretary, Karnataka Government, told Business Line.

By end of 2006, a fairly substantial part of Bangalore will be unwired, said Mr Kailashnathan, Managing Director, Microsense, a WiFi service provider that has interest in the project. Government offices, Electronics City and scores of IT parks will be the first to go wireless, he added. Bangaloreans can then expect to enjoy 25 MBps wireless access to the Internet from their WiFi-enabled mobiles and laptops. WiFi is a wireless data transfer technology based on IEEE 802.11b standard.

Bangalore currently has around 100 WiFi hotspots in cyber cafés, hotels, airport and other places.

In the first phase slated to be ready by the end of 2006, these will be expanded and overlapped to give the city a complete coverage of WiFi hotspots.

In 2007, the infrastructure will be upgraded steadily to 802.11a, g, and n, which offer incrementally improved data throughput rates.

A wireless mesh network that will combine the characteristics of cellular networks with WiFi may also be proposed, according to the EoI.

The best is yet to come: a wireless fabric that seamlessly connects the hotspots. This will use a metropolitan access network technology, WiMAX (Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access) for backhaul connectivity.

WiMAX is based on IEEE 802.16, has a range of 50 km and offers bandwidths from 500 kbps - 2 MBps (scalable in theory to 70 MBps!)