S.O.S. - Internet access in India
A LazyWeb request: Have you heard of anyone in India with reasonable Net access at home? If so, how? And have you ever heard of Net access via satellite here?
My highly unreliable cable provider just told me I’ve blown through my 10 GB download cap in 2 weeks. (Avoid InCable.)
My neighborhood’s phone lines have been down for 2 months, so no DSL works. I’ve done my daily MTNL puja at the government phone company. Misters Naik, Narwekar and Pathan have enjoyed the pleasure of 15 in-person visits. They know my face, I’ve had chai with them, seen their Disneyland photos. (Avoid MTNL.)
A business-style leased line seems to be around $6K up front.
Coming from an 8 mbps cable modem in NYC, I’m badly bandwidth-starved here. Help me solve this and enjoy more of my dreck on the Internets.
on Tuesday, July 25th, 2006, 8:00 pm in Tech › 
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Manish: have you tried Hathway? I don’t think you’d get much incremental speed, but at least it’s reliable and it supports my home wireless network [desktop + 2 laptops] reasonably well. I don’t know if they have service in Bandra though.
Manish,
I’m in Goa, and quite happy with my BSNL unlimited usage package at 900 Rs per month. It’s no US-speed cable, but it suffices.
There is at least one decent cable supplier in the Bandra area. If that’s where you are, drop me a line. I’ll give you a contact.
Ultrabrown is pretty cool, by the way. I check it daily, you have a fan on the Konkan Coast.
I dunno if you have Airtel broadband in Mumbai; in delhi’s it’s thee best. Rs 1k for 256 mbps, unlimted download
Yea your screwed.. There are no real options for home,. and no one in Bombay gives an unlimited plan but Hathway and those prices are ridiculous( I was paying 85k a month for an unlimited 512KB line about a year ago). At office we’re ok with the MTNL, and your right it is a darshan. Instead of Mr. Naik, I got Meera Saaheb. We have a 2Mbps in the office for 10k a month with a 16GB limit. But thats MTNL whom you wish to avoid. Theres really no other option. Even for home I use a plan where I get unlimited usage from midnight to 8am but its a 256Kb connection.
And be happy that at least the f*ckers at In2Cable told you that yuo were out of bandwidth. On my supposedly unlimited plan, they just decided to keep cutting my bandwidth in half once I blew through their limits. I started out with a 256K connection and a few months later I land up with 32.
Is Sify a possibility? I cant think of anyone else really. Reliance Fibre is available in some places, but I doubt a residential areas seeing it, unless you got a couple of BPO’s close by.
Iv looked into this stuff a lot so drop me a line if I can help.
Don’t you have AirTel in Mumbai yet? AirTel rocks in Delhi. Unlimited access and download bandwith for Rs. 999/- Excellent service with almost zero downtime.
And the speeds are pretty good too. I get about 50 kBps at night, sometimes even more. One ripped DVD takes about 5-6 hrs to download. What else does one need?!
Oops, didn’t read Shivam’s post. By the way, that is 256 Kbps!
Thanks, guys. The feedback I got put Airtel on top, but they haven’t wired my hood yet. So I’m now trying Iqara, which has not-very-well-known business plans for 512 kbps and 768kbps unlimited at exorbitant prices, though much less than a leased line. (256 kbps is Rs. 1500, 512 kbps is nearly 10x that because it’s sold to businesses. Go figure.) Anyone tried these guys?
I learned some key things after posting this. One, my assumption that everyone shares infrastructure like in the U.S. was incorrect. I had thought I was stuck with the existing wires no matter who operated the service. But Airtel runs its own DSL wiring to the building despite our phones being down, and Iqara runs its own cable even though I already have cable TV. That gives me a few more options.
Second, a couple of providers (Iqara and Hathway, according to Amit above) do offer 512 kbps unlimited business plans, they’re just not well known. This guy even claims to have a 1 mbps line from Iqara at Rs. 6K/mo, but they don’t seem to have this plan anymore.
Overall, the consumer Internet scene seems really undeveloped here– these are half the speeds I got 10 years ago at 4x the dollar cost, in a country where many things are 1/10th as expensive as in the U.S. That’s almost two orders of magnitude less efficient than the first cable modem trials in California. So there’s some fundamental economics going on here which don’t jive. I’ve heard that the data cables coming into India are too low capacity, so bandwidth gets parceled out jealously and expensively. It’s certainly a large business opportunity.
What about Reliance Infocomm.. they’re good.. and they offer services in Certain areas chk it out.. Tata Indicom SUCKS big time.. Freaking hell.. God Bless comcast~~~~
Its really bad in Mumbai. I pay AUD49.95 or USD 43.92 a month for 24 Mbps unlimited download (speed drops after 20 GB to 512kbps). The same access in Mumbai would have cost about INR 100,000 or USD 2,480.09 or AUD 2,821 a month.