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monitoring kit which could be installed at each kiosk. This would measure pressure, temperature, humidity, rainfall and wind speed and direction multiple times a day and store the data in a central data base. This would enable micro-weather research as well as enable rainfall (the only uncontrolled variable in agriculture) insurance to be made available in a village. Today TeNeT is experimenting with outsourcing of production in rural areas using the Internet kiosk to co-ordinate production. In other areas it is experimenting with rural BPOs. With computers and connectivity, Indian urban areas have gained tremendously in terms of wealth and confidence in providing services to west. With computers, connectivity and hard working people, can rural areas provide IT enabled services to urban areas? This would generate wealth in rural areas and give confidence to rural youth that they are equal to any one in the world.

One of the primary stated benefits of convergence is education. It is well known that rural areas perform poorly compared to urban areas in examinations, largely due to poor schooling and due to a lack of exposure. TeNeT along with n-Logue is driving an education program which is making a significant impact in rural areas. The program uses educational material developed at IIT Madras and delivers it to customers in village kiosks over the WiLL network.

When 100 million telephones in India happened in 2005, the TeNeT group set itself newer goals. These were to help enable 50 million Broadband Internet connections in India. Towards this, TeNeT is helping Midas become a broadband Access Provider. It helped develop DSL technologies and Fibre Access
Technologies, and also helped create Broadband corDECT WiLL technology, which can compete with low end DSL technology. At the same time it works on WiMax and WiMax plus. Details of these are given in section 3. To compete with high end DSL, the group has innovated and come up with a unique system called cable wireless, which is further discussed in section 4.

At the same time, the group recognized that the PC is too expensive and too complex a system to reach a large number of middle class and lower middle class homes. It helped create a company called Novatium and have come up with a unique product called Network PC or multi-media thin client. Priced at Rs 4000/- plus monitor it connects to a broadband network and
provide a complete PC experience at a home with all storage and server being placed at Telecom Service Provider end.

 

Not all of TeNeT group activities relate toconvergence or even Telecom. The group has expanded from three faculty members to over fifteen faculty, each with their focus activities. However, most of these activities are motivated by concerns such as those articulated above. An interesting example, is work in image processing. The group has developed a real-time system for performing fingerprint verification by deriving features from local ridge orientations. The system is quite robust to translations, rotations and plastic deformations. This system is being integrated into the low-cost ATM machines mentioned earlier. Similarly, growing traffic rates in urban cities is an area of concern and automated traffic monitoring is a critical part of any transport planning. The group is building an automated vision system to facilitate effective traffic management by monitoring traffic data and collecting useful vehicle statistics [1]. The key challenge is to handle heterogeneous traffic conditions on urban Indian roads. The parameters that the system can determine, are vehicle-type, vehicle-speed, headway, headway time, and traffic volume.


3. K E Y ENAB L E R S FOR B ROADBAND
     WIRELESS ACCESS


Providing last mile broadband connectivity to homes and offices using wireless technology is a big challenge. Limited spectrum per operator, high anticipated user densities, and diverse quality of service requirements of increasingly cost conscious users, make it indeed very difficult to define and build broadband wireless access (BWA) solutions. For these very reasons, the deployment of 3G data services have been delayed in India, and also in many other countries.

Nevertheless, the last two years has witnessed the advent of many proprietary BWA solutions as well as significant progress in standardization activity for cellular wireless metropolitan area networks (MAN). Studying the emerging broadband wireless standards from IEEE, namely 802.16d/e and 802.20, and also gleaning from the long term evolution (LTE) activity of 3GPP and 3GPP2 forums, it is clear that certain wireless technologies have gained universal acceptance as key enablers for BWA:

  1. Packet switched air interface with quality of service (Qos) support

    A QoS aware, packet switched, wireless last mile is clearly essential for convergence. In order to provide QoS for heterogeneous packet data subscribers sharing the same wireless medium, efficient scheduling at the medium access (MAC) layer is very important. Incorporating dynamic scheduling and QoS