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Business News/ Tech-news / News/  Networked in the land of Noble laureates
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Networked in the land of Noble laureates

Purasakkudi, Mangudiancestral villages of Raman and Chandrasekhar, respectivelyto get connected to the Internet on the World Wi-Fi Day

Microsense has set up Wi-Fi hotspots in the villages of Noble laureates C.V. Raman and Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar. Photo: iStockphotoPremium
Microsense has set up Wi-Fi hotspots in the villages of Noble laureates C.V. Raman and Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar. Photo: iStockphoto

Chennai: Two little-known villages in Tamil Nadu—Purasakkudi and Mangudi (also known as Agaramangudi)—will get networked to the world through the Internet on 20 June, the World Wi-Fi Day.

They weren’t randomly chosen. Purasakkudi and Mangudi are the ancestral villages of C.V.Raman and his nephew Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, who received the Nobel Prize for their contribution to physics through the Raman Effect and the Chandrasekhar limit, in 1930 and 1983, respectively.

Microsense, a Chennai-based company focused on connectivity and networking, has set up Wi-Fi hotspots in these two hamlets.

Microsense’s managing director, S. Kailasanathan, who studied at the Indian Institute of Technology-Madras and the Indian Institute of Management-Calcutta and is an ardent fan of Raman, wanted to network these two hamlets ahead of 250,000 other villages waiting to get connected under a government plan.

The trigger was an appeal by the Wireless Broadband Alliance to all its members to do something special on 20 June, the inaugural Wi-Fi Day being celebrated worldwide. The Wireless Broadband Alliance is an industry association formed to promote interoperability between operators in the Wi-Fi space.

To begin with, Microsense, which has been providing Internet connectivity since 2000 to premium hotels and other commercial spaces, will set up Wi-Fi hotspots for internet access at few locations in the villages— panchayat office and residential neighbourhoods—using the company’s cloud Wi-Fi platform.

Most of the villagers own simple smartphones, and Rajiv Talwar, director of the company, hopes that the 1,000 families in the two villages will be able to access internet when Wi-Fi hot zones go live.

“There are of course challenges in providing connectivity—provisioning power, drawing in the last miles from far-off locations, besides deploying the Wi-Fi gears. Physical security and safety of this equipment, including real time maintenance is also a challenge that Microsense engineers are getting ready to wade through," said Sujit Singh, CEO, Microsense.

To help students of these villages use the Internet as an education tool, Microsense will donate two laptop computers to a government-aided school and a desktop to serve as a common resource for use by the villagers.

Uma Parameswaran, grand niece of Raman who wrote a biography of the scientist, quotes her uncle’s words. “Ultimately the aim of scientific knowledge is to benefit human life."

Raman Effect is the change in the wavelength of light that occurs when a light beam is deflected by molecules. Raman recorded his observations of the effect in 1928. Chandrasekhar Limit, in astrophysics, is the maximum mass theoretically possible for a stable white dwarf star.

In 1930, the year Raman collected his Nobel Prize, Chandrasekhar made the same boat trip to England to join Trinity College, Cambridge as a research student. Fifty-three years later, the latter shared the award with William A. Fowler for theoretical studies of the physical processes that are important to the structure and evolution of the stars.

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Published: 16 Jun 2016, 06:50 PM IST
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