are you on kloud9

Amidst the pristine hills of Kodaikanal, in the western ghats, a rural revolution begins.

Announcing the launch of BSNL wifi broadband services (kloud9), on 25th September 2010 in the village of Pallangi, about 10 kms from kodaikanal.

In a place where nature is still pristine, practically in the edge of civilization, closer to the forest than to the nearest village, we discovered an urge to connect with the rest of the world. About a year ago, after we completed building our home; we took upon challenge of getting broadband services to houseofkodai (also known as nammaveedu in tamil).

Although rural broadband is fashionable, makes good headlines, and everybody seems to be talking about it – the ground reality is, it simply does not exist. It makes little business sense for the big boys of telecom to invest either in technology or infrastructure for poor old rural India! Its just easier for them to shell out 1000s of crores in licensing fees to provide 3g services to the urban elite!

Coming from a technology background and interacting with friends and experts in the field, we soon realized that if we wanted broadband Internet at our home, we had to build/get it ourselves. After all, necessity is the mother of invention.

The distance between the cup and lip – we could almost see the mobile towers, which were providing us voice services and dial-up Internet; this and the knowledge that most mobile towers were connected to super-fast fibre-optic network – led us to work on the famous “local loop” problem – connect the end-user/customer to the core network.

Wifi technology, the stuff that enables your laptop to connect to your office/home’s broadband Internet without wires is what we started to experiment with – the difference being, instead of working within few 10s of meters – we had to make it work across 10s of kilometers; thus leading us into the journey with several trials and even more errors. The nice thing about making mistakes for us is that we never forget – every time we forgot to take simple things like the correct spanner or power adapter, we’d have wasted an entire day (had to travel about 100 kms by road to get it)

Having mastered the technical nuances and innovating in areas such as antenna-mounts (the difference in long distance wireless is that a few degrees off vertically or horizontally you get zero-band; and when properly aligned we get broad-band), and hardware/software (thanks to linux and the all the other open source efforts which make this possible) we were able to get the bits moving reliably across long distances – how long, you wonder; our current setup includes a 40km link. The next target is 100 kms.

Our choice of working with BSNL, was obvious from the beginning. They have the largest telecom infrastructure and being part of the government meant that they understood the social/long-term aspects and were really committed to providing broadband services in villages. The top management of BSNL, TN circle have been extremely encouraging of our efforts. We worked together to successfully complete a 3-month field-trial by integrating our technology with their backbone network.

Having successfully made broadband reach houseofkodai, we were then inspired and encouraged by BSNL to make affordable rural broadband a reality across Tamil Nadu and across India.

And so a new journey begins, we are proud to announce the launch of “BSNL wifi broadband services” on 25th September 2010. Starting with a coverage of 5 villages, in the remote areas of Kodaikanal, we are offering “unlimited 512 Kbps broadband Internet at Rs. 750/- month” the same as what urbanites are enjoying.

Finally, rural Indians can connect with the vast BSNL tower network and enjoy the benefits of broadband Internet from the comfort of their own villages.

we are on kloud9, are you ?

p.s. did we mention that this wifi service network is built and managed by young village farmers whose maximum qualification is +2! Seeing is believing – do visit us, interact directly, question us on philosophy, organic farming or complex technical aspects such as signal strength, polarity, antenna alignment, tcp/ip configuration…of course, you’ll get to enjoy the scenery, unpolluted air, clean water, company, etc. as a side effect.