E-Business

Kerala’s experiment with wireless

Project Akshaya, the country’s largest wireless rural network, is a pointer to the direction state governments can follow to overcome the challenge of bridging the digital divide, says Srikanth RP

This network is unique and has no parallel in any other country Col H S Bedi Managing Director Tulip

A fter becoming a fully literate state in 1996, the government started work on its next vision: to make Kerala India’s first e-literate state. The objective was two-fold. The first one was obvious—to make use of IT to enhance the efficiency of services rendered to the common man. The second was to provide employment opportunities to its vast pool of educated, unemployed youth.

The district of Malappuram was chosen as the pilot site with the aim that one member of every family in the district should become computer literate. In the first phase, the plan was to set up stand-alone training centres in 600 villages selected by the district panchayats, with five computers in each centre. Each of these centres in turn would have around 2,000 families allotted to them. Their task would be to train one member of each family in all the basic computer operations. After that, the next phase was to make the centres commercially viable. For making this happen, the centres were to be provided high-speed data connectivity for Internet access and Intranet operations. The basic idea was to have a network wherein all government offices, schools and other state organisations would ride on the network. Once this project was successfully executed, it would be extended to the remaining 13 districts of the state.

Terrain trouble

While the project was well-conceived, the district of Malappuram is one of the most difficult places for implementing a network. The district is a hilly terrain of 3,600 sq kms, with very thick vegetation. A wired infrastructure was out of question as it was considered impractical and expensive to deploy in the region. Creating a wireless connectivity network was also a big challenge as vegetation absorbs the wireless spectrum. After floating a request for proposals, system integrator Tulip IT services was chosen to implement it.

A heady mix

For creating the wireless network, Tulip chose a mix of wireless technologies, Versatile Intelligent Network (VINE) and Wireless in Local Loop (WLL). The backbone uses VINE which is a relatively new technology for establishing point-to-point links. Suited for rugged terrains, each repeater in a VINE network requires only one radio with two antennae, one pointing forward and the other backward. What’s more, as the network grows, each node in a network can be promoted to become a repeater. This allows each node to be deployed as the centre of the network, and makes it suited for overcoming the challenges of line-of-sight issues. Throughput is high at 8 Mbps, and can be scaled up by adding another pair of radios if the need arises. The access network which connects the centres to the backbone is based on WLL; this is a point-to-multipoint wireless wide area networking system which utilises IP. The system can carry voice, video and data services on a single platform over a wide area. Each of the 600 centres can hook up to around 22 POPs using WLL equipment. With a transmission capacity of 4 Mbps, the bandwidth can be used to provide services such as Internet access, video conferencing and e-learning.

Applications

As Kerala has more than 25 percent of its population working abroad, VoIP and video conferencing have turned out to be popular applications. Besides video conferencing, villagers frequently access the Internet to make rail reservations, file police complaints and do money transfers. Today the network connects 600 centres, 56 government offices and a few schools and colleges. Once it is fully in place, the government plans to extend it to other districts. While the state will bear the cost of setting up the infrastructure, each entrepreneur of an Akshaya centre will pay around Rs 1,000 per month for utilising the infrastructure.

Says Col H S Bedi, managing director of Tulip, “This network is unique and has no parallel in any other country.” The total project cost works out to around Rs 5 crore, which would have been roughly ten times more if the government had decided to use the wired option. Project Akshaya is an indicator that we must now consider the option of using wireless to bridge the digital divide.

srikanth@expresscomputeronline.com