Silicon Mountains offers direct-to- home Internet access in Pune

On June 1, 2000, Pune will become the first city in the country to have Internet access virtually on tap. The ubiquitous cable operator who has been bringing the whole world into individual homes through their idiot boxes will now bring the World Wide Web on to their desktops.

Silicon Mountains, promoted by a group of cable operators, has begun providing direct-to-home Internet connectivity through a hybrid fibre optic coaxial cable network.

The services are being offered in association with Global Electronic Commerce Services, a national level ISP license holder. Global will provide the international gateway for the service, as well as the payment gateway systems.

A 100-km length of optic fibre cable has been networked across the city between a Terayon-supplied cable head end at the Silicon Mountain headquarters and 36 distribution nodes, while coaxial cables connect the nodes to the individual consumer delivery points.

What this means is that Pune's Net nerds need not suffer pangs of
disconnection, snail-speed downloads, or keep an anxious eye on the minute hand ticking away each time they connect to the net.

The use of the hybrid fibre optic and coaxial cable network backbone provides continuous, high speed, reliable, disturbance-free Internet connectivity without any restriction on the number of hours. Accessible round the clock, Internet connectivity will be available at speeds of 10 mbps, over 500 times that of the normal dial-up service.

Subscribers will be charged a monthly rental of Rs 1,200, besides Rs 350 as rental for the cable modem. This will be in addition to an initial down payment of Rs 2,000, plus a refundable security deposit of Rs 3000.

"Considering the charges levied by ISPs for Internet connection and the telephone charges paid during Internet time, we are offering the services at a fraction of the cost," says S.S. Patil, chairman, Silicon Mountains.

The company expects to have over 25,000 subscribers within the first year of operations, spanning out into all of Maharasthra within the year. Miraj, Sangli and Kupwad are the next immediate targets, where cabling work has already begun.

Another interesting aspect of the project is that it is hybrid in more ways than one. Not only is the use of cables, both fibre optic and coaxial, hybrid, but the delivery mechanism of the cables is hybrid too – some underground, much over the air.

While some cable has been laid underground wherever possible, a large chunk of the 100-km fibre optic cable crisscrosses over the tops of buildings, earning the sobriquet: "Fibre in the air."