The Hindu Business Line : Pune airport to be wi-fi-enabled soon

Talking to presspersons, Mr S. Kailasanathan, Managing Director of the Chennai-based Microsense Pvt Ltd, said Pune was the first airport where the company would be offering its entire wifi services along with service provider Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd (BSNL).

He said at the Chennai and New Delhi airports, Microsense has been able to cater to only a section of deployment.

Goa, Ahmedabad and Hyderabad airports would also be wifi-enabled in a couple of months, Mr Kailasanathan said. Mumbai airport is also being looked into, he said. Mr Kailasanathan said it would be able to offer its customers a bandwidth of 256 kbps and could support 20 users at one time.

The customers would have two options, postpaid and prepaid. The postpaid which would be in two packages, one the pay-as-you-go model and the package deal. The pay-as-you-go model would be with no rental fees and would be charged at Rs 1 per minute. For the latter the customer could opt for a one, three or six months package and would be charged at around Rs 9 per hour. He said a flat fee would be paid to the Pune Airport for the offer of wifi services.

Mr Kailasanthan said Microsense has also tied up with BSNL for setting up hotspot locations in around 100 places in the country and this would be based on the built, operate and transfer mode. However, the billing and network solutions would be catered to by Microsense.

MTNL has also roped in Microsense for setting up 100 hotspots in Delhi and 100 in Mumbai; and Airtel, the mobile wing of Bharti has about 60 hotspot locations, which would be addressed to by Microsense. The Airtel tie-up would be based on cost sharing and revenue sharing basis, he said.

Mr Kailasanathan said the company has recorded a turnover of Rs 20 crore for the fiscal ended March 2005 and was looking at revenue of Rs 35 crore for the current fiscal. He added that about 50 per cent of the revenues came in from wifi services.

Microsense looking at overseas projects

THE Managing Director of Microsense, Mr Kailasanathan, said the company is now stepping overseas for its wifi installation and has already completed its installation at the Taj Hotel in Sri Lanka.

It is also doing a project in Maldives, which is expected to go on stream within a couple of months. The company is in the final stages for installation of wifi for the hospitality segment in West Asia, Asia Pacific and part of Europe.

Mr Dina Nath, Regional Head, Mumbai, said since the Sri Lankan authorities wanted a set up in Sri Lanka, they recently opened an office. It also has a centre in the US, which mainly caters to software development.

The billing and network software solutions have been developed in the US, he said. Mr Dina Nath said about seven hotels have touched base with Microsense for the wifi installation in West Asia, about five in the Asia-Pacific region and a hotel chain which has about seven hotels is also in the pipeline. He said these projects would be either based on the BOT model or the cost sharing/revenue sharing basis.

Looking at Pune in specific, he added that it was now targeting the five star hotels, which included Le Meridien, and also the four star hotels spread across the metros in the domestic segment.

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