Indian government engineering college IIT Madras has tied up with Nokia under a 3 year partnership to create solutions to enhance broadband connectivity in rural India. Nokia will fund and offer tech expertise for research at IITM’s Center of Excellence for Wireless Technology (CEWiT) and explore using unlicensed spectrum to offer cheap broadband connectivity to remote rural areas. Under this initiative CEWiT will verify WiFi broadband feasibility of unlicensed spectrum radio access technology for internet connectivity. Lukup Media, an on demand TV and ad platform, which received a Unified License to launch data, TV, and video on demand services through a single connection in the country, also launched a 1 Gbps wireless solution called Lightup to transmit data. However, this is more of a personal internet connection than one for the public. Lightup will operate outside of the licensed spectrum to offer connectivity. Slow progress with BharatNet The government’s ambitious BharatNet project, which has been in the pipeline for 5 years now, has laid optical fibre in 36,738 gram panchayats till 17 January. Since its launch in 2011, the project which aimed to cover 250,000 villages in 3 years, only managed to pilot in Idukki in January 2015. Other initiatives to bring internet to the masses: - In November, Facebook and BSNL entered into a partnership to create 100 WiFi hotspots in rural areas in India. Facebook planned to invest Rs 5 crore per year to buy bandwidth from BSNL in this joint venture and rollout by 31 December 2015,…
