The gateways are to be in Chennai and Pune, with more to be added in the third year of operations.

The launch in April is going to send battle signals in the two states to the existing internet providers, in the public and private sector. ``Our ultimate aim is to provide internet services free,'' said Dishnet officials. But for starters, Tamil Nadu subscribers will be charged Rs 3000. The package entitles a user for an hour of free surfing every day with a charge of Rs 10 for every hour thereafter for the next five years. Subscribers who wish tobrowse in net centres of dishnet franchisees will have to pay Rs 20 per hour after the first one hour. For women, the subscriber fee is to be pegged at Rs 1800 only, with one hour free browsing every day for the next five years. A 30 per cent quota is to be allowed for women. Besides this, a 100 connections would be given free to government school teachers and this scheme would go on rotation in the following weeks to enable more and more school teachers to enroll. For the TN subscriber, the cost works out to a mere Rs 1.73 the first hour (even less for women) after which he would have to pay Rs 10 (for his own connection) and Rs 20 if he is using a franchisee outlet. This would be far cheaper than VSNL or Satyam Infoway charges or MTNL. While Satyam charges Rs 3900 for 100 hours (Rs 39 per hour) and VSNL charges Rs 3500 for 100 hours (35 per hour) the advantages are obvious for the Dishnet service subscriber who would not mind paying Rs 10 from the second hour of usage in any one day.

For subscribers inMaharashtra the rates are different. The fee of Rs 3000 applies, with one hour free surfing for the next one year. This translates to Rs 8.21 for the first one hour and Rs 10 thereafter, again far cheaper than MTNL services. Various slab rates would also be on offer, for those who want it, again lower by 50 per cent to the prevailing average rates.

In return, the revenues for Dishnet are expected to come from virtual private networks set up for corporates and from e-commerce. Dishnet proposes to own 90 per cent of its infrastructure, but franchisees will do the marketing `with different flavours in different states'' said Dishnet director J Vijay.

The company has applied for a bandwidth of 34 MBPS (currently it has got 2 MBPS) and 1500 lines for starters. Customers will be serviced in the 1: 10 ratio of line is to subscriber. The subscriber base is pegged at 30,000 by the end of the first year. Dishnet can have 60,000 concurrent users, with a total of 300,000 users.