Sify to add 200 cyber cafes every quarter

By siliconindia   |   Monday, 13 October 2003, 19:30 IST
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NEW DELHI: Getting aggressive on its retail initiatives, Nasdaq listed leading Internet services company Sify plans to set up between 100-200 "i-Way" cyber cafes all over the country every quarter. "Our major focus area now is i-Way and broadband. We are continuously adding to our i-Way family where we would like to add at least between 100-200 every quarter," said Sify president and COO George Zacharias. The company already has over 1000 cyber cafes under i-Ways scheme. Sify is the largest franchised operations for cyber cafes in India at present. In broadband, the company has just launched a product that allows a customer to get broadband-over-cable at the price of dial-up where he may not be able get download at that speed but he does not have to pay the telecom charges. In this offering, the user has to pay just Rs 10-12 an hour for a 64 Kbps shared link and this is much cheaper as in a dial-up, user pays Rs 7 for Internet plus Rs 24 for telephone, he said. Providing broadband to homes through cable operators is a very workable business and is going to grow, Zacharias said, adding that the company was tying up with cable TV operators and it already had 100 operators with them. Sify, he said, may post net profits in "not too distant future".