Bangalore may soon get unwired for seamless Internet access to individuals, households and corporations, says the Times of India.

Speaking to The Times of India, state IT secretary M K Shankaralinge Gowda said the project would be a joint effort between government, companies like Intel, and Internet service providers. “We are currently in the process of drafting a viable business model. And only after that we will have clarity on issues like revenue sharing, implementation and cost of the services,” he said. Intel has already prepared a white paper on “unwiring Bangalore” that talks about the current net access situation in the city, possible usage models, technology framework, risks and advantages.

Surendra Arora, director, (Asia Pacific Solutions Group), Intel, said the project would be set up using a combination of WiMAX and Wi-Fi. The city already has over 200 hot-spots.

Bangalore’s International Tech Park illustrates why moving operations to India makes sense to many companies. The 69 acre International Tech Park, 12 kms from Bangalore Airport, includes office, production, commercial and retail space and includes a satellite teleport with transpacific fiber connections.

Bangalore is getting competition from Southern India’s Kerala state which plans a 1,000-acre “Smart City“, designed to attract software developers and call centers two of the Indian economy’s fastest growing sectors. It will be created and managed by Dubai’s Internet City. It is being built with an initial investment of US$400 million and offers foreign companies 100 percent tax-free ownership, no currency restrictions, easy registration and licensing and protection of intellectual property.

Other broadband hubs around the world include:

• The Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore is creating a “Games Bazaar” to offer game companies hosting services and bandwidth for their online titles. It hopes will entice publishers to consider Singapore as a hub.The government of Singapore is getting into the video game business and they hope to establish Singapore as the first Asia-Pacific node within the Global Operational Grid.

  This initiative is undertaken by HP and National Grid Office (NGO). The Adaptive Enterprise@Singapore, with partner Hewlett Packard, is a projected S$22 million strategic collaboration designed to enable enterprises to benefit from grid and utility technologies. The Global Operational Grid is being built by a worldwide consortium of partners, including e-Science in the United Kingdom, Tera-Grid in the US, CERN and HP.

  According to IDC, the Asian online games market could hit US$1 billion by 2006.

  
  Singapore’s Infocomm Development Authority is similar to India’s Bangalore International Tech Park, Korea’s Incheon or Hong Kong’s Cyberport (above).
• Korea’s ambition to become a Northeast Asian hub gained momentum as three districts of the western port city of Incheon were designated as a “free economic zone”. Incheon, formerly an estuary harbor near Seoul, will play a critical role as a Northest Asia hub.South Korea, a country of 48 million people, is the world leader in multi-user online games, helped by tens of thousands of PC salons where people can get affordable high-speed Internet access. About 65 percent of households have broadband. KT serves about half of them. KT Corp. competes with Hanaro Telecom and Korea Thrunet for high speed access.
• Malaysia’s Multimedia Super Corridor (MSC) is a hi-tech incubator for information, communication and technology. The highly successful program is being followed by other countries, especially emerging countries, said corporate vice president, Mobile and Embedded Devices Division of Microsoft Corporation, Ya-Qin Zhang. “MSC is really the focal point, and its success is beginning to travel to other regions”, he said.
• The Hong Kong Government has spent $2bn, developing Cyberport – the newest “teleport” on the planet. Cyberport has taken four years to build and comes complete with a hi-tech hotel, apartments, shops and services.

Perhaps the United States should do what what Asian countries do — create an International zone.

Japanese VDSL modems connect to fibre optics cable. It delivers 100Mbit/s down and 70Mbit/s upstream for about $28/month. What side of the Pacific do you choose if you’re in business?

The Biomedical Informatics Research Network (BIRN) is a National Institutes of Health initiative involves a consortium of 15 universities and 22 research groups that participate in distributed collaborations in biomedical science centered around brain imaging of human neurological disorders and associated animal models. The development of the National LambdaRail (video), Lambda Light Switch and the Opticomputer make it a reality. Here’s a riveting one hour lecture by Larry Smarr.

Related DailyWireless stories include; Gollum Blows Hollywood, Transnational Media Production, Outsourcing US, Sony’s Cell Comes Alive, Grid Becomes Self-Aware, Creating an International Zone, West Coast Grid, Unreal Games, XBoxLive: 1M subs by June?, X-Box + IBM Chips, Playstation2 Goes Grid, Telepresence Now!, Grid Conference, GIG-BE, Multi-Player Frontier, and Korean Gaming.

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Posted by Sam Churchill on Friday, August 5th, 2005 at 4:26 pm.