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New Indian Express, 25 April 2025
Net4india to make phonewala.com one-stop Internet shop
CHENNAI 24 April:net4india telecentres will no longer provide just Internet telephony. “It will dive umpteen number of other services,” says net4india CEO Jasjit Sawhney.
“Since the bandwidth is in place, we can use it for, say, video conferencing, distributing net telephony cards, domain registration, web hosting etc,” says Sawhney.
The net4india telecentre concept was launched around four months back in New Delhi as a Public Call Office that uses the Internet backbone to deliver ISD calls for its customers.
Named phonewala.com, these PCOs worked on a franchisee model, where the customer making that ISD call did not even have to know how his calls were being routed.
All he had to do was dial the ISD number using a normal phone and get connected at rates of Rs 6 for a one-minute call to the US. But the phone did not work like a normal landline.
It was connected to an Internet Protocol device which converted his voice into data packets and sent it to the destined location, from where it was reconverted to vice using a voice gateway provider.
This concept circumvented the need to go to a cyber café to make an ISD call.
Sawhney says a franchisee had to make an investment of just Rs 1akh to get the PCO running.
The last mile connectivity for the phone connection would necessarily have to go through a large basic service provider, like BSNL, who will then connect the PCO to the net4india network though an optic fibre connection.
This ‘penultimate mile’ connectivity of 140 mbps bandwidth costs Rs 20-25 lakh per year, says Sawhney.
Sawhney adds that 140 telecentres are now operational across nine metropolitan cities with 40 of them in Chennai alone.
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