Technology

RajIV, an Andhra Pradesh government undertaking, has received a private sector fillip following tie-ups with companies like ICICI, Hutch, Naukri.com et al. in bringing broadband connectivity to villages across the state.

"There are around 20 other companies, including seeds and fertiliser companies, that are looking at expanding their reach through Internet as well as physically through our kiosks," Myneni said. This apart, there are some organisations that are looking at tying up with the consortium to provide weather information, etc, to farmers as well.

Lightreading has an interesting write-up on the steady influx of venture capital funding into Indian telecom equipment manufacturing start-ups.

It's an outgrowth of the earlier investment waves, says Sanjay Nayak, Tejas's CEO and managing director. "So many large companies were doing outsourcing that a huge talent pool got exposed to their knowledge," he says. "We could literally pinpoint good people with experience."

As reported previously, the SEA-ME-WE-4 undersea cable linking 14 countries across Asia, Africa and Europe has gone live as scheduled. Both VSNL and Bharti have a stake in this joint venture. VSNL will also function as the primary network administrator of the venture.

India is now officially a bandwidth surplus country, and international bandwidth prices are expected to fall steadily as a result of this development.

C-DAC is spearheading an initiative to setup a national grid computing network named Garuda. The grid will include India's indigenously assembled supercomputer - PARAM Padma, and will interconnect research institutions - IIT, IISc etc. - across the country. The initiative has received a grant of Rs. 145 million from the Department Of Information Technology.

At the Broadband Tech India 2005 conference yesterday:

TRAI chairman Pradip Baijal: BSNL should share its network with other operators to promote broadband connectivity. Not doing so will only promote other private players.

BSNL director (finance) SD Saxena: BSNL can not share its network just because it has one. It will not be able to bear the loss incurred by sharing its network with others.

With the announcement that Microsoft are planning on investing USD 1.7 billion into India (over four years), the total amount in terms of investment plans announced over the last 11 weeks has touched USD 10 billion. Most of these investments are scheduled to go into research and development.

Besides Microsoft [USD 1.7 billion], Cisco [USD 1.1 billion], Intel [USD 1 billion] and SemIndia with AMD [USD 3 billion] make up the bulk of the rest.

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The SEA-ME-WE-4 submarine cable network has been completed and is ready to be commissioned. However, Indian 'security agencies' apparently need to provide the go-ahead before this can happen. Upon commissioning, India's external bandwidth (via submarine networks) will jump up to about 540 Gbps. The SMW-4 cable will eventually be upgraded to provide a capacity of 1.2 Tbps.

The cable runs through 14 countries: Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Bangladesh, India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Algeria, Tunisia, Italy and France.

The Hindu has an article on the possibility of a Subsidised/Free PC named "iT" making it into the Indian market. The idea behind this project is that these computers will be distributed for free but are supported by - for want of a better term - "Adware".

The keyboards that come with these PCs have a set of large and prominent keys that link to the services provided by various companies. These companies in turn pay large sums of money to be linked via these keys, thus offsetting the price of the computer.

Intel has decided to kill the Bangalore based Whitefield project. The much hyped processor would have been the first to be designed and developed entirely in India, but Intel India pretty much shot itself in the foot when it had to let 250 employees go over an audit scandal. Following the axeing of a significant portion of his department, the Whitefield project head jumped ship in August, thereby (presumably) prompting the slide.