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Mumbai students, first to taste broadband wireless technology

By Anand Parthasarathy

Mumbai Oct. 21. The technology is as yet only a standard, and has not been commercially deployed anywhere in the world, but a group of management students here have become the first in the country to sample the futuristic WiMax technology — providing wireless connectivity to the Internet many times faster and farther than what is available today. To provide delegates to the ongoing Intel Developer Forum (IDF) a whiff of tomorrow's broadband wireless technology, the chip giant's Chief Technology Officer, Pat Gelsinger, interrupted his key note presentation for a live demonstration, where an Internet connection was established between a cyber café on the roof of the venue and a classroom of the Mumbai Educational Trust a few km away.

The link-up used the new standard called 802.16 that is seven times faster than today's Wi-Fi wireless Net technology and can hop over 50 km rather than 100 metres. Practical deployment is still two years away — but some pioneer agencies including Intel and Fujitsu have formed a special interest group to kick start application development.

The president of Intel India, Ketan Sampat, told The Hindu that WiMax seemed to be ideally suited to solve what is known as the `last mile' problem — bridging the `digital divide' between the fibre optic cable-enabled urban areas and the rural heartland. The company would be partnering a group at IIT Madras headed by Ashok Jhunjhunwala to develop WiMax applications for rural connectivity, he added.

In a separate briefing for The Hindu, Mr. Gelsinger said the next ramp-up of clock speeds in the Pentium chip line beyond 3 GHz, would begin in early 2003. Intel has also put together a single-chip solution for wireless Internet, codenamed `Manitoba' which Taiwanese mobile hardware supplier Mitac has just deployed in trial quantities of cell phone handsets. By next year, the chip was expected to run under the hood of a number of mobile phones.

Over 1400 computer technologists are participating at the Intel forum that concludes on Wednesday.

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