Publication: The Times of India
Section: Times Business
Date: June 02, 2007

Dhanya Krishnakumar | TNN

Bangalore: Imagine you are working from home and you are waiting for an urgent reply from your boss, but the internet connection seems to be at its slowest best. You would do anything for the connection to become slightly faster. You call your service provider and he tells you that too many people are logged in, resulting in an overload, or he claims that the line that connects to your house is faulty. 

Excuses you have been hearing time and again. So is the only option to grit your teeth and wait patiently for the server to receive your mail? Well things might not be as difficult post June, if Sobha Renaissance Information Technology (SRIT) has its way. Researchers at SRIT have come up with a software engine called Dyna-Rate, which will allow a service provider to provision bandwidth depending on the need of the hour, or in other words provide you with bandwidth as per your demand!

Says Phanikanth Kudapa, head of IP technology programmes in SRIT and the brains behind this project: “Dyna-Rate is a telecom operators software system component, which will allow for subscribers to decide their internet bandwidth on a real time and dynamic basis. It does this by provisioning or providing the requested bandwidth based on availability. It also calculates the actual usage of services and bandwidth at any given time for billing purpose, which means a consumer will be charged only for his actual usage and not on the package he subscribes to. But most importantly the software communicates between the billing and operating systems at the service providers end and balances subscriber requests through operators service portals on an immediate reactive basis.” 

Dyna-Rate would enable the subscriber to decide the service and connection speed, integrating pro-rata billing into the system. This service request is subscriber/user-initiated through the service provider’s portal. It is capable of configuring the network access server to allow protected services to be made available to a particular user upon receiving the request. It also supports reversal of charge for undelivered services.

What’s more, the software allows the service provider to redefine the services offered ranging from accessing mail to chat facilities to downloads etc and bundle them according to the customers convenience. Says Kudapa, “We have broken the conventional paradigm of service creation and bundling by getting into extreme levels of granularities that are possible in service definitions similar to those in the GSM world. A service provider could now define things like ‘Mail Access’ as a service. It would mean that the end user subscribing to just ‘Mail Access’ will not be able to do anything else but access mail services.”

Just like on your mobile phone, wherein you can choose between say free talk time and free SMS, you can choose your internet packages based on whether you would like to check your email, merely chat or download some music. One can also change options in the midst of a session and even get value added services like mail filtering to sieve out spam and junk mails as part of this new level of granularity.

With this software engine, companies enrolled as corporate customers will be able to define different levels of internet access to their internal users (employees). These employees can be given access to their corporate subscription from any place, where the service provider has coverage. And the best part, only the corporate customer gets billed, not the employee.

SRIT will launch Dyna-Rate at the London Telecoms Fair on June 4. RailTel Corp has had a preview of this product and is said to be interested in the technology. SRIT says that RailTel is positioning this IP technology for their “Unwired City” programmes including the soon-to-be-launched “Unwired Bangalore” programme which is being driven by ITI.

WHAT DYNA-RATE DOES   

• Allows subscribers to decide their internet bandwidth on a real time basis
• Integrates pro-rata billing 
• Allows service provider to define the services offered — accessing mail, chat facilities, downloads etc — and bundle them according to the customers convenience