Dated December 30, 2002
The Economic Times: At Your Fingertips

A Pune-based IT company hopes to take on the giants in providing information, communication and entertainment (ICE) at a much lower cost than some of the current majors in the field.

DiviNet Access Technology has unveiled technology that allows broadband access for the masses through an innovative gadget and network architecture.

It says a distribution module placed in the basement of a building could provide service to as many as 20 apartments at one time. The second phase of trials is currently underway here to connect 500 users and the commercial launch is slated for April 2003.

The core team that developed the country's PARAM supercomputer is the brain behind the DiviNet technology. Christened RAMNet (Remote Access Metropolitian Network) it permits users to access television, internet and telephony with a single point access mechanism through its Customer Premises Equipment (CPE).

"RAMNet, which replaces multiple gadgets by one, converts a television into a multiple-use gadget. Subscribers can listen to multiple radio channels, view free-to-air video channels, subscribe to pay channels, watch movies, ask content on-demand and use it as a personal video recorder too," said P.R. Eknath, Chief Technology Officer of DiviNet.

"Our objective is to provide an affordable and secure technology to people with speed ranging from 64 kbps to 10 megabytes per second for information, communication and entertainment to residential and corporate clients," he said. Eknath added that the futuristic technology would provide high definition television quality to end-users. Television sets, hitherto used only for watching entertainment channels, can now be used for interactive broadband applications, said Eknath, a former chief technology officer with the Pune-based Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) who was involved in developing PARAM series of supercomputers.

The CPE also facilitates access to email, SMS, on-line chatting and gaming, browsing the net and interactive education and shopping. It also offers Conditional Access System (CAS) as one of the built-in-functions, and at Rs. 7,000 comes at less than half of what a digital CAS gadget would cost.

The technology is multilingual and supports all the interactive services through the chosen language of the user. The technology had won DeviNet in September 2000 the first E.Bliz challenge award of $150,000 instituted by Dubai Internet City for world-class innovative eBusiness.