This is a first from telecom company. MTNL ties up with Novatium for low cost PC’s. It only affirms what I had been asserting long time back. The hardware is incosequnetial and the real growth of broadband can only take place if the telecom firms sell their broadband as a service concept rather than an add on to the plain vanilla service. This only would make the service viable.
Novatium does away with the basic CPU as you know of. All the computing takes place at the central server which serves as a hard drive. So in effect you just connect the system to broadband and access the web. This makes sense for India because this model is based on sound economic fundamentals. I am glad that Novatium is getting the required media attention; for long they have been languishing in the background. If I am not mistaken, it’s run by Rajesh Jain, the guy who made crores after he sold his portal to Sify for a whopping 400+ crores during the height of dot com boom. It’s another story that Sify turned his magic into a wasteland.
He chose to slowly invest his money in ventures like these and runs a popular blog called as Emergic. Even though it runs on yucky Movable type platform, I still enjoy some of his write ups.
Novatium would surely be a project to watch out for. I really hope that BSNL picks up this idea and rolls out a nationwide service. Telecom operators would then become true blue service providers.
I hope that they iron out the chinks like uptime of the availability of the platform. I assume that the service is also prone for breakdown if the telephone goes kaput. MTNL is known for it’s customer apathy and I dare not venture in it’s smelly offices. Further, Novatium would have to recoup their investments. Interestingly, they offering a choice between Linux and Windows platform. If linux can get a mainstream exposure, I am sure that it would do a world of good to them.
Some one from Ubuntu India should contact these guys to roll out preloaded Linux boxes. It is a breeze to learn the new desktops and for a person who has never been exposed to computers, it would be the right thing to do; unless one is forced to unlearn crappy windows and learn Linux from a scratch.
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