2009 and we are still stuck on 256kbps for broadband

[anonymous220]

I assume Home500 is Rs 500/month, \"up to\" 2Mbits, 2.5GB limit (Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd.)

This seems like an attractive plan, but personally I could eat that up with email and leaving my IM clients online without difficulty. Not to mention software updates!

I can be certain that we won't have any of this \"night unlimited\" rubbish. You all might think you're getting a \"good deal\" because you're \"not paying\" for those 12 hours that you can't access the net... but I'm afraid I just can't wrap my head around it.

I would guess the net is so heavily used by everyone on these plans that the experience is horrible, anyway, so whats the point? If anyone has any insight on this, please do tell: maybe it's a power (electricity) thing? Is it cheaper at night? I know my net traffic costs me the same at night, so...

I can tell you this though: unlimited traffic within the network, maximum speed within the network (your speed plan only comes in to effect at our network border), and if we do unlimited speed plans, we're thinking of a simple (pre-paid?) top-up system whereby users buy say 10GB or 100GB at a time.


for me its 1.5GB limit not 2.5GB and i agree its just too low. the night 2-8 free i most often dont used. even when i use its only at 6 in the morning, its tiring to get up so early in the morning.

i thought about the Airtel plan- 2Mbps, 15GB limit with no free usage time but the amount Rs1200 is a bit high for that plan.

For each Megabit, you can download 10 gigabytes - so someone with an 8 Megabit connection would have a limit of 80 Gigabytes. To make it an even sweeter deal, I'd be offering unlimited local transfers (that is, between customers of my provider) at whatever the maximum allowable speed of the backbone is (in most cases, speeds would be limited to 100 Megabits either by Ethernet or the Cabling itself - most peoples GigE cards might offer them up to 400 or so, but thats about the limit of most copper wiring when you take in to account the distance and repeaters and such).

this is a great plan, only the pricing remains to be seen. i probably wont need more than 20GB and i need the speed to be at least enough to watch youtube videos without having to wait for them to buffer.

so 2Mbps, 20GB limit with reasonable price would be a nice plan for me.

on second thought maybe 3Mbps, 30GB limit would be better.

 

[vishalrao]

Important for me is a plan which has a guaranteed fixed price with no risk of unexpected overcharges... meaning either a truly unlimited plan or a FUPed plan where the speed reduces after a generous download limit but the service continues and monthly rental remains a fixed amount. this is avoid hassles of billing errors and disputes.

To start off I'd like to see a 2 mbps UL (or 100GB FUP with speed reduced to half is acceptable to me)... for under Rs 3k per month...

Can you achieve that mgcarley? (or any ISP for that matter dammit!) airtel is already doing 2mbps UL (with FUP for some users) so you can shoot for better...

(of course you would still offer "free" UL downloads for internal data transfers)

the most brilliant idea (which we've been crying for many years now) is the mirroring of microsoft/windows servers and other linux distros and open source software (and whatever else you can manage) so that downloading them is FREE of the data caps! that would really excite me the most...

also, getting into a dialog with NIXI to enable better/faster/cheaper peering between operators would make broadband faster and cheaper in general too...

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btw, mgcarley, please also post your thoughts and website link on other forums like techenclave.com - i hope admin doesn't mind me mentioning them here

 

[mgcarley]

And I would be very surprised if other major ISPs in India are not already doing the same.


For normal HTTP browsing, that's a given. I'm talking about full-on mirroring of software repositories, such as the ones mentioned so that 1. Downloads are faster and 2. Downloads from these repositories don't count towards the monthly quota.

What will be the mode of broadband delivery - ftth, dsl ?

If you are going to be doing DSL then I have some suggestions.

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Please ignore the question above - I managed to get the answer from your website.

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Yeah that's in a sorry state right now. Newer prettier one I'm told should be out within a week or so. As I mentioned to one person in an email response last night, we don't think the existing cable/phone networks can support the kind of bandwidth and applications we wish to serve. As such, we have to build our own. An arduous task, perhaps, but the response from people like you guys has been such that we are increasingly confident. Even your government is directly interested in this (hopefully they don't ruin it!)

Reg. Hayai Lightspeed - why 3, 12 and 42Mbps *only* on Wimax? What if I was a user in a building to which you have FTTB but require no more than the 3Mbps plan? Just curious .

FTTB - FTTH doesn't make much sense because of the population density and works out to be roughly the same at the end of the day.

Wimax is considered to be more of a backup option in areas where we have not yet/can not lay fibre for whatever reason. We will be discouraging it in areas that are served by wired solutions in favour of a wired solution OR a properly mobile option using our own dedicated data-only 3G-like network.

In any case, if you only require a "small" (eg 3Mbit) connection, then that's all you get, but, that 3Mbits "limit" only comes in to effect at *our* gateways to the world, rather than on each individual line. The main reason for this is to allow sharing of content within our network to be done at maximum speed, reducing network congestion.

As a result, you should be able to transfer a 700MB file in about 1½ minutes, rather than 30 minutes at 3Mbits - without the *need* for DC++ in order for it to work - just transferring files between friends over Skype or Yahoo or whatever will work at full speed if you're both our customers. For those of you on Slashdot, if I say something about "a truckload of DVDs", you'll probably understand what's driving me here.

That said, however, we are toying with the possibility of having some plans which simply remove all speed tiers altogether, and you just pay for what you use as far as data is concerned (and not at 60 paise per MB, that's just ridiculous) - we're thinking more like 20GB for Rs1000 or something like that. Maybe we'll use this type of option for pre-paid customers: I can't say for sure as we're continually adjusting the variables which will determine our final MRP.

By the way, if the possibility of only 20GB of data scares you, fear not: like with our own software repositories, sharing files within the network also doesn't count towards quotas, whether it's streaming audio/video or just a big chunk of data as mentioned earlier.

It also means if you're a heavy bit-torrent user like I am, that, for the most part, if someone else has already downloaded whatever you are downloading and they're seeding, then probably only 10-20% of that file will actually count towards your quota - the other 80% will come from the guy who had just downloaded it.

My last word on this is that I'm relatively sure that as time goes on, the novelty of saturating your 24 or 50 or 100mbits connection constantly does wear off somewhat - I say this from personal experience - and now having many terabytes of USB hard drives sitting in my closet (though much of that may have been in preparation for coming here) - put simply, it becomes difficult to actually acquire content fast enough to keep the connection saturated. Believe me, I tried!

 

[mgcarley]

for me its 1.5GB limit not 2.5GB and i agree its just too low. the night 2-8 free i most often dont used. even when i use its only at 6 in the morning, its tiring to get up so early in the morning.


Agreed. I had often wondered why ISPs bother with this sort of arrangement. It seems to be little more than a lure.

i thought about the Airtel plan- 2Mbps, 15GB limit with no free usage time but the amount Rs1200 is a bit high for that plan.


Airtel does offer pretty good value for money by comparison with the other large ISPs, though I'm not sure that this particular plan is available in the Mumbai circle? I may be wrong here.

this is a great plan, only the pricing remains to be seen. i probably wont need more than 20GB and i need the speed to be at least enough to watch youtube videos without having to wait for them to buffer.

so 2Mbps, 20GB limit with reasonable price would be a nice plan for me.

This kind of application is certainly one of the things that we wish to provide a decent experience on.

What is your idea of a reasonable price for this plan? (just for my reference)

Important for me is a plan which has a guaranteed fixed price with no risk of unexpected overcharges... meaning either a truly unlimited plan or a FUPed plan where the speed reduces after a generous download limit but the service continues and monthly rental remains a fixed amount. this is avoid hassles of billing errors and disputes.

To start off I'd like to see a 2 mbps Unlimited (or 100GB Fair Usage Policy with speed reduced to half is acceptable to me)... for under Rs 3k per month...


I understand. Unfortunately, with more speed comes direct cost, in that for every gigabyte of transfer, on a VSNL standard line, we're looking at Rs 34 or thereabouts, not including our overheads. NIXI is Rs 50. These are things we have to take in to account. So a 2Mbps plan has the capacity to transfer over 500GB in a month - you do the math. This is one of the reasons that we wish to implement (unlike other ISPs) the bandwidth quotas ONLY on international or peering traffic: as mentioned in my previous post.

It is unfortunate that as far as international bandwidth is concerned, there are only 3 main providers competing - compared to over 30 each in the US and UK. This is our struggle, but we're really working on it. If I had $600m handy I'd just build my own cable - not that Tata, Reliance and Bharti are using theirs even close to capacity!

As also previously mentioned, we are considering the possibility of eliminating the *speed* caps on some plans altogether, so if you buy 100GB of data, you get that much usage as fast as it will go - not just at 2mbits or whatever, so for users like yourself, this may be a more favourable option, and it would be easier to bring the overall price down on a plan like this.

Can you achieve that mgcarley? (or any ISP for that matter dammit!) airtel is already doing 2mbps Unlimited (with Fair Usage Policy for some users) so you can shoot for better...


Airtel also own their international cable. We're not quite there yet, but all going well, I wouldn't rule it out. The question is, though, is Airtels 2Mbits plan any good? Having not experienced it myself, for all I know it could be complete rubbish and you might only get 1mbps - or less. Or it could be completely fine and because they have an STM-64 (nearly 10Gbits) or two, their wholesale price of bandwidth is lower than what mine is - at least to begin with.

As far as I am aware, the 100GB fair usage policy applies to all users who actually hit that limit. I am open to the same sort of thing on some of our lower plans (8Mbits or less). I'm not a fan of over-use charges either, and I loathe the fact that we have to even have bandwidth caps, but alas.

Perhaps what we could do is set the bandwidth quota to be hard: that is, if you buy a plan with 10GB, once you hit like 98% of 10GB, when you browse to a webpage, you get a warning telling you you're about to go over with the option to purchase more data at a set rate, and when you hit 100%, all browsing takes you to such a screen, and all downloads are stopped.

This way, instead of worrying about things when your bill arrives, the situation is thus prevented of customers complaining "oh bugger, I've used 430.2mb more than my allowance, which cost me an extra Rs 258".

(of course you would still offer "free" Unlimited downloads for internal data transfers)

the most brilliant idea (which we've been crying for many years now) is the mirroring of microsoft/windows servers and other linux distros and open source software (and whatever else you can manage) so that downloading them is FREE of the data caps! that would really excite me the most...


Glad to hear it. Looks like something that will definitely be put in to effect from day 1. We may end up having the equivalent of Tucows India or download.com India, and also something like iTunes for "Indian" content - high quality digital versions of Indian music and movies (which would cost a few rupees, of course, but again, would not affect your quota) - but I think that is a whole different project in itself, and would probably come after launch.

also, getting into a dialog with NIXI to enable better/faster/cheaper peering between operators would make broadband faster and cheaper in general too...


In a continuous dialog with NIXI - they tell me the price is being lowered "soon". But to what and when this will happen they have not revealed to me. I'm also in talks with CDNs around the world, incuding (but not limited to) Akamai, and we have an entire rack reserved for their servers when they're ready to give them to us.

btw, mgcarley, please also post your thoughts and website link on other forums like techenclave.com - i hope admin doesn't mind me mentioning them here

I do also post at the other India Broadband forum (run by the same admin, I think?) and TechArena. And Twitter. I hope to also be giving a talk to ILUG in Mumbai in the not-too-distant, but it's not confirmed yet.

 

[anonymous220]

Airtel does offer pretty good value for money by comparison with the other large ISPs, though I'm not sure that this particular plan is available in the Mumbai circle? I may be wrong here.


i dont know about Mumbai but in Chennai it's available.

What is your idea of a reasonable price for this plan? (just for my reference)

For 2Mbps, 20GB limit-Rs1000 or less. is this reasonable for u?

 

[manu1991]

@ mgcarley - the LAN speed transfer between users is a killer idea , I would want to take a connection solely for that . if its available here that is Hopefully it wont be a 50 sq km venture like railwire

 

[mgcarley]

i dont know about Mumbai but in Chennai it's available.


For 2Mbps, 20GB limit-Rs1000 or less. is this reasonable for u?

I'll see what I can do - if not as a regular price, I would also be open to promotional prices for 1. evangelists and 2. forum users; as I consider both groups to be valuable customers and sources of information.

@ mgcarley - the LAN speed transfer between users is a killer idea , I would want to take a connection solely for that . if its available here that is

Hopefully it wont be a 50 sq km venture like railwire

We're launching definitely in Mumbai at first. I'd like to launch in the other Tier-1 cities at the same time if possible, however we're still sorting those out with the respective authorities in each area.

Railwire was supposed to be released on a large scale this year (they promised me a connection in Q4 '09), but in my discussions with Railtel at their offices in Mumbai, that probably isn't happening as soon as they'd like. In Mumbai itself, it's particularly a cost issue: it costs them Rs 50 lakh per kilometer - NOT including the cable - from what they've told me. Outside of Mumbai, laying cable is supposedly significantly cheaper.

As you can imagine, therefore, we are spending many hundreds of Crores on Mumbai alone. Tata supposedly managed to get 1,500km of fibre laid in Mumbai South for about 230 crore which works out to only 15 lakh per kilometer, so I'm trying to figure out just how they've done that.

As it stands right now, we're currently trying to ship over 3,500km of fibre from abroad for ours. Not much on an India-wide scale, but I can see it being used in Mumbai and the surrounding areas alone

 

[saurabh28]

I'll see what I can do - if not as a regular price, I would also be open to promotional prices for 1. evangelists and 2. forum users; as I consider both groups to be valuable customers and sources of information.



We're launching definitely in Mumbai at first. I'd like to launch in the other Tier-1 cities at the same time if possible, however we're still sorting those out with the respective authorities in each area.

Railwire was supposed to be released on a large scale this year (they promised me a connection in Q4 '09), but in my discussions with Railtel at their offices in Mumbai, that probably isn't happening as soon as they'd like. In Mumbai itself, it's particularly a cost issue: it costs them Rs 50 lakh per kilometer - NOT including the cable - from what they've told me. Outside of Mumbai, laying cable is supposedly significantly cheaper.

As you can imagine, therefore, we are spending many hundreds of Crores on Mumbai alone. Tata supposedly managed to get 1,500km of fibre laid in Mumbai South for about 230 crore which works out to only 15 lakh per kilometer, so I'm trying to figure out just how they've done that.

As it stands right now, we're currently trying to ship over 3,500km of fibre from abroad for ours. Not much on an India-wide scale, but I can see it being used in Mumbai and the surrounding areas alone

Hmmmm........
In Mumbai from which area ur starting????
Hope, u provide service in Navi Mumbai also.

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u said u r providing unlimited internal LAN sharing for free....
r u going to create HUB for that?????

 

[mgcarley]

Hmmmm........
In Mumbai from which area ur starting????
Hope, u provide service in Navi Mumbai also.

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u said u r providing unlimited internal LAN sharing for free....
r u going to create HUB for that?????

Yes, Navi Mumbai and Thane are included. Basically the closer you are to a railway station, the earlier we'll be able to deliver access, but as we're continually collecting data on which areas have the most demand, I suggest you go to the website and register your interest so that your suburb can go higher up the priority list.

At this point we don't believe there is a need for a DC++ hub - the network is being built in such a way that it's not necessary: if the user is on our network, file transfers will be at max speed, irrespective of how the file is being transferred.

I think from here on in, I will create my own thread with all the information about how the service works, as having read through my responses this morning, I'm becoming a little repetitive, for which I apologize. I also apologize that AFAIK, I'm not technically allowed to advertise the website here (admin, please correct me if I'm wrong), but I believe someone has linked to it in this thread.

 

[saurabh28]

Yes, Navi Mumbai and Thane are included. Basically the closer you are to a railway station, the earlier we'll be able to deliver access, but as we're continually collecting data on which areas have the most demand, I suggest you go to the website and register your interest so that your suburb can go higher up the priority list.

At this point we don't believe there is a need for a DC++ hub - the network is being built in such a way that it's not necessary: if the user is on our network, file transfers will be at max speed, irrespective of how the file is being transferred.

I think from here on in, I will create my own thread with all the information about how the service works, as having read through my responses this morning, I'm becoming a little repetitive, for which I apologize. I also apologize that AFAIK, I'm not technically allowed to advertise the website here (admin, please correct me if I'm wrong), but I believe someone has linked to it in this thread.
Do u have a website????
If so then message me or PM me