Hughes takes lead in CSC deployment in India

New Delhi: HughesNet Fusion has taken lead in tying up with State Service Agencies (SCA) to rollout the company's services at 17,356 common service centres (CSC) in the country.

The company has already tied up with Comat Technologies, Shahaj SREI, Zoom Developers and 3i Infotech. The company is also in talks with other SCAs for providing CSC services in rural kiosks.

Hughes has already tied up with Comat to roll out CSC kiosks in Sikkim, Tripura, Uttar Pradesh, Haryana and Uttaranchal.

The company has also tied up with Sahaj SREI for setting up rural kiosks in West Bengal, Bihar and Assam, besides inking deals with Zoom Developers for Assam and Manipur and 3i Infotech for Haryana.

It is working closely with SCA to ensure smooth deployment of HughesNet Fusion Services at CSCs in nine states. The company is also gearing up to deploy these services pan India across rural regions.

The agreeement with SCAs will help in bridging the digital divide by combining advanced satellite technology of Hughes with state e-Governance applications.

HughesNet Fusion is presently providing services like satellite based education and training, high speed Internet, railway reservation and mobile top-up.

In future, the rural customers will enjoy a range of e-Governance and other value-added applications on an affordable basis.

Despite e-Governance applications not available to rural masses, the village level entrepreneurs are earning around Rs 1,900 per month and this will increase once e-Governance applications and business to customer (B-2-C) services are launched phase wise by different states.

Hughes has a total market share of around 31 per cent in VSAT equipment space and has installed 5,234 VSATs in FY 2007-08 taking the overall tally of VSATs to 25,474.