BB hunting

This is December. The time of the year when the semester exams get over and serious gaming days begin. It's also the time of the year when offers from Internet providers are coming! So to the BroadBand providers, "Let the competitions begin!"

Since I am changing residence, I figured this would be the best time to change my internet connection as well (yea, not the best logic in the world).

I am currrently hooked up with TouchTel which is now AirTel after being acquired by AirCel. I am with the Rs.995 per month for 128Kbits/sec for 25hours plan. Though the price is too much and the hours offered is too low, I think this is the most consistent and reliable BB provider in India.

Since my family is moving residence to the next street, we get to keep the same phone number. So I don't have to change the Telecom provider (which is Touch Tel, ofcourse), but I can withdraw from their DSL offer and choose some other BB provider.

I used to be the run-of-the-mill dial-up (l)user before I switched to my 128kbps line. I've been receiving bills in the range of Rs.3500 to Rs.5000 per month. Ofcourse this includes the phone charge, but we use the phones for receving calls more than making them ourselves. That makes our phone charges around Rs.100 to Rs.300 per month.

[Heh, I recall the last month when a TouchTel customer support lady ringed me up to tell me, "make more phone calls". No kidding! :)]. At that time when I bought this plan, this was the best out there (with a phone atleast) in my area. It introduce me to the incredible world of Gigabytes: warez sites, gnutella, kazaa and recently BitTorrent. After having tasted the speed, I naturally want more...

So, I am hunting for new "BroadBand" service. If you had noticed the quotes, then you know that there is a catch: In India, there is no real broadband. Only during the middle of this year the TRAI fellas 'upgraded' thier definition of BB to 256kbps (from 64kbps?). I don't know the official definitions but they seem to be around 11 or 12 mbps. Sure, a lot of fellas seem to offer that kinda service nowadays, but they are experimental and after more customers are drawn into their network, there WILL be a permenant bandwidth/download cap.

So far I have considered SIFY, Reliance's Netway and BSNL's Data One and DIAS, in that order. I am yet to decide on whom to give my (father's) bank. These are big players with B.I.G big plans for BB in India, mind you.

First off, Reliance:

Reliance is a big company ruled by an awesome man who said "India is a land of billion oppurtunities", when asked about his plans for NetWay in India. Netway is gonna be simple: Provide a 100MBytes/second per household in India by the end of 2005. This is carried by Reliance's optic fiber backbone running through the country's streets (motorists will remember this one). This may look puny to those who have read the 1GigaByte/second plan in Japan, but it will work for me. But then again, I don't want to wait till then.

Currently, Netway charges Rs.1200 for 256kbps with a download cap of 10GByte (Rs.1.40/MByte afterwards). Nice. Will have to think about it though because there's one more plan for 512 kbps with the same download cap, but for Rs.3000 ;) BSNL's Data One: Reliance was good, but to further reduce costs, I went onto look at the newly advertised Data One service, named after their Cell One cell phone account. BSNL says that they would affer 256kbps to 8Mbits/sec on ordinary copper cable (DSL) from Rs.500 onwards. That is pretty cheap. But a lot has been left unanswered, like download/bandwidth caps, distance from exchanges, etc. But this service won't be available untill after December of this year. Also, since this is DSL, I will have to pay for a new phone line as well. But if the final costs come to something cheaper than it is now, I will happily keep a second phone (prolly in my closet). BSNL's DIAS:

I don't have much info on this one than that it stands for Direct Internet AccesS. But it seems that depending upon your distance to the nearest digital exchange, you will get speeds ranging from 128kbps to 2Mbps on an existing telephone line. Rate range from Rs.485 to Rs.3000 for corresponding download caps from 200MByte to unlimited. (I am going to find out if I am lucky enough and there's a BSNL exchange near my house.)
This is all I can gather from their home page. What it doesn't say is, whether the price is the same for both 128kbps and 2Mbps connection. What, should a company be lucky enough to get a hi speed connection?

SIFY:

This is a really bad egg. Do a google on it and you'll be surprised at how a single ISP can influence so many hate clubs for itself. I guess SIFY broke the record for that one. One of the most active clubs for this I have seen is Sushubh's. And recently my friend Balakrishnan was a victim of their adverisement fallacy. Since I don't feel like starting a YASHC (Yet Another Sify Hate Club), I think I will stay away from it.


I am sure there's more so called Broadband providers around redefining Broadband as 115kbps (Reliance infocomm and Tata Indicom), but no thanks. It seems, "If enough people use the term wrongly, it would be correct". Well, to those people, think again if you want to get (and make) India faster.

One provider that I forgot to mention was Net4India, a Brit company that has launched broadband internet for homes and businesses. My friend sriram krishnan, has this connection since he was lucky enough to live in the test area (the lucky pig) and he seems to get speeds ranging from 2Mbits/sec to 15Mbits/sec. But recently, due to increase in customer base, that has come down to less than 1MBits/sec. There is a franchise of Net4India in my area, but since I live outside of his cable limits, I can't have it. And he is still in experimental phase of launching. Such is fate :(

[Quick facts:
As of May'05, countries like canada, usa, japan, etc had more than 75% BB users. In India, there were about 0.02%]

In the end, my requirements (low cost, non-NAT, Broadband (the indian kind: atleast 256kbps), no or very high download cap) are met by TouchTel, Reliance Netway and BSNL DataOne (also DIAS). I am sure my current provider and all the others will come up with massively attractive bandwidths and other offers. So I guess I will let the companies fight themselves in the market and jump in when things simmer down.