Sify has over 3000 VoiP enabled cyber cafes called “Sify Iway” in most the major cities (149 cities) and towns of India. These are franchise run cyber cafes where SIFY provides the network and billing software to run the cyber cafes. The billing is centralized and each cyber café makes money based on the number of hours of internet usage. Users have a single sign-on ID which is created once during initial the registration process.
Just like prepaid mobile, IWAY provides you prepaid broadband access with a roaming user ID which you can use in any Sify IWay cyber cafe’s through out India. About 60% of Indian users access their broadband internet in cyber cafés and SIFY has most of this market share. Lot of Indians have their first broad band experience in one of these cyber cafes which are very popular with the school and college kids.
The SIFY Iway cyber cafes have computers which are stripped down Microsoft Windows with absolutely minimal storage options. Once the user logs out of the computer all the files created during the session are deleted, so the only option is saving the files as an attachment in an email message. Besides local storage doesn’t make sense, since it’s a shared PC and users might end up using a different PC during the next visit to the cyber café.
These computers have the mandatory Microsoft Office which is used mainly for editing or updating resumes. These machines are strictly meant for browsing, but lack of choice in terms of operating system limits them to using Microsoft Windows.
Companies like Google, Yahoo which are putting together the components for a WebOS, should take a closer look at iWays, since webOS has better chance of getting accepted in this model. If Google were to launch a Gdrive, online storage of bookmarks, Word Processor, Spread Sheet etc which could be delivered over the web, IWAY can be perfect match for this technology.
If a network computer every made sense for mass captive audience, then this is the best fit.
Since this is a prepaid service and the cash credit exists in the user account, this can be tied up with some sort of payment system to enable transactions like Railway ticket booking (which is huge in India) and Airlines reservations etc. Ecommerce is a relatively un-tapped field in India with great potential for growth because of lack of proper payment options.
Sify Iways also have VoiP enabled telephone booths which are used for providing extremely cheap (6 cents per minute to US) international phone calls. These are cheaper than the rates of any state owned or private telephone service.These cyber cafes provide a major growth area for Broad Band in India. Since the cost of ownership is divided, people can access broadband at the rate of 40cents per hour without ever needing to invest in a PC.
Besides Sify is a major ISP in the Indian market, which again gives the possibility of distributing toolbars/instant messengers to the ISP users.
PS: This blogpost was sitting in draft mode for the past few months and for some reason never got published. Since the time of writing this article, some four months back, Google launched Google Browser Sync and Google spreadsheet.
