44 India's Best IT Implementations of the year 2005

Continued from page: 9

Friday, June 03, 2005

Wireless Franchisee Reliance Infocomm

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Project Head: Ashish Kumar Chauhan, CIO 
Location: All across India

Bandwidth availability and penetration has increased manifold but, when it comes to connecting the remotest of villages, wired connectivity are either not available or not up to the mark. In several cases people have used VSAT)to provide connectivity to such places. ITC's e-Chaupal, last year's Best Implementation, uses VSAT to connect such villages. A VSAT link suffers from high latency; the equipment is expensive, has high power requirement, and setup is time consuming. When it comes to connecting, a 1000 locations with minimum cost, using a device with minimum power requirement, for transaction oriented applications, VSAT is not suitable. 

Faced with a similar problem, where neither VSAT nor wired links fit the bill, Reliance Infocomm used CDMA and phones to wirelessly connect around 2200 Reliance shops, and partners to its corporate network. The phones, used as data modems, are ordinary CDMA phones, which people use for Internet-access on the move. The connectivity provided is used for running Reliance's Web-based POS and CRM applications, enabling real-time bill payment, account status checking and instant connection booking. VPN is the solution that organizations use to remotely and securely connect to corporate applications.

Rather, than doing encryption and tunneling at the user end, VPN connections to the corporate systems are provided by the network for all phone numbers of Reliance franchisees. This eliminates the need for the users to create VPN tunnels to the corporate network to access it.

The project, started in Feb 2004, is the first time that mobile phones have been used as a medium of connectivity to thousands of locations, including the remotest, for running business applications. Though, the project can be easily passed as run-of-the-mill by many, it has presented to all of us an alternate connectivity option for making secure WAN links, which can be used by, say, a bank to connect some remote branch, or a project like e-Chaupal, which is running across hundreds of villages. Presently, the maximum theoretical speed offered by CDMA is 144 kbps, which should be sufficient for many applications. Apart from that, it can also be used for securely connecting ATM machines, mobile credit-card payment devices and other POS terminals.

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