Wireless Internet over Wi-Fi

Bangalore's fancy for tech is evident if you look around in the city. It is not just the Infosys Technologies' or Digital GlobalSofts of the Garden City that have adopted avant-garde names; smaller businesses also have a penchant for the new economy.

For instance, there is a mechanic I know who calls his shop Cyber Motors, a plumbing outfit called Technic Sanitation, a Solotech Driving School and even a bodega called Cyber Wines.

I was then not very surprised to read a small sign when walking out of one of my favourite coffee shops in Bangalore that it offered a Wi-Fi (wireless fidelity) connection. Where else would you find Wi-Fi making an entry in India.

For those of us like me who are more familiar with high fidelity, Wi-Fi is a hugely popular wireless technology in the West and south east Asia because it is dirt-cheap and allows transfer of truckloads of data at amazing speeds.

Wi-Fi (or 802.11) technologies refer to specifications by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers for wireless networking among computers and other devices. The 802.11 standard comprises a few sub-sets operating in different radio frequencies.

The most popular, 802.11b is a standard for wireless LANs operating in the 2.4 GHz spectrum with a bandwidth of 11 Mbps. Other standards support speeds up to 54 Mbps.

In the US and Europe, it is a common sight to watch people surfing with their laptops and handheld computing devices hooked on to the Internet or their office networks over Wi-Fi connections. Such Wi-Fi connections are enabled by wireless clouds or access points set up by wireless phone companies, coffee chains like Starbucks, hotels or airport companies.

Café Coffee Day, a deli-chain of the privately held Amalgamated Bean Coffee Ltd, has wireless-enabled its outlet on Lavelle Road, downtown Bangalore, making it the first Wi-Fi cyber café in India. The Taj group of hotels has enabled Wi-Fi networks in some of its properties on a pilot basis. Access, of course, is enabled only for its guests.

The coffee shop uses a D-Link access point and a Dell laptop with a D-Link wireless LAN card. It charges Rs 50 for half an hour of surfing and throws in a cappuccino worth Rs 20 free. This charge is more than the Rs 25 for 30 minutes of surfing that Café Coffee Day charges at its wired cyber cafes elsewhere in Bangalore and the Delhi airport.

If you expect blazing Internet access speeds at the Wi-Fi cyber café, you are likely to be disappointed. My surfing experience was a shade better than dial-up speeds. The reason for this is simple: the Café Coffee Day shop has hooked up its wireless access point to the Internet through a cable Internet connection.

Speeds of Internet access on cable in theory can go up to 2 Mbps, but seldom deliver more than 128 kbps (at least in Bangalore). An alternative could be a leased line hook-up, but that would be expensive.

For now, the value that the Wi-Fi-enabled Café Coffee Day offers is not scorching speeds that the technology affords, but simple wireless access. So, if you're sitting at a table sipping coffee and suddenly feel the urge to surf or check mail, an Internet-enabled laptop comes to you, rather than you having to go to office, home or a dingy cyber café.

Or, if you stroll in with a laptop with a wireless LAN card or a handheld PC that is wireless enabled, then you can hook up through its wireless access point.

Café Coffee Day is waiting for customer response from its Lavelle Road Wi-Fi experiment before deciding whether it should expand the service to its other outlets. "We want to go on with this for a few months and then take a call," says Sudipta Mukherjee, head, marketing of Bangalore-based Amalgamated Bean.

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