Bangalore has more bandwidth than Mumbai: Minister

BANGALORE, SEPT. 25. Bangalore has overtaken Mumbai in regard to bandwidth for information access and communications, the Minister of State for Information Technology, Prof. B.K.Chandrasekhar, said here on Tuesday.

Bangalore now had 370 MB bandwidth compared to Mumbai's 150 MB, he said. As on September 6, the Optic Fibre Cable (OFC) network in Bangalore covered around 2,671 km. against the planned total network of 4,800 km., he said. The momentum of expanding the OFC network would be kept up after the rainy season.

Prof. Chandrasekhar was inaugurating the two-day seminar on ``Pervasive Computing'' organised by the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), Karnataka.

Despite the slowdown in the IT sector, 165 new companies were registered in Bangalore over the past one year, and this showed the resilience of this sector, he pointed out.

The State Government was very much aware that connectivity and bandwidth in the City had to match international standards and was already on this job, increasing the communication infrastructure.

Bangalore had already prepared a platform for pervasive computing which went beyond PCs to embedded devices with everyday home usage, the minister said. The public utilities could, for example, use this technological innovation. This would be one way of making pervasive computing serve the needs of the bulk of the population.

The Chairman of the Wipro Corporation, Mr. Azim Premji, said in his keynote address that pervasive computing implied access from several devices anywhere and any time, almost invisibly. Pervasive computing would be human-centric, widely networked and personalised. It could be easily accessed and would not need complex computer commands.

On a personal level, a person would be able to check e-mail anywhere, anytime, check one's bloodpressure from a sensor in a watch, order movie tickets and get traffic information while driving a car. For corporates it could mean access to employees anywhere, a paperless working environment and more business applications, Mr. Premji said.

The scope for pervasive computing would increase worldwide with year 2004 projections of 700 million cellphones, 18 million Net TVs and 15 million other devices, besides 175 million PCs, he said.

Mr. Suresh Vaswani, Convenor, IT Panel of CII, Karnataka, said the seminar theme dealt with computing beyond PCs and covered embedded processors which could total 14 billion in a few years. The seminar aimed at demystifying pervasive computing and would be addressed by speaker from IBM, HP, Microsoft, Texas Instruments and Wipro.

Mr. Sudhakar Pai, Chairman, CII, Karnataka, welcomed the delegates.

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