mgcarley
Founder, Hayai Broadband
@mgcarley
I wont find much use for the unlimited speed offer, considering the purpose of my downloads and the exorbitant prices that you may charge for them. Presently, for me the sweet spot would be 2mbps with 50gB of downloads per month... its just right for me, by the time I finish one anime or sitcom episode, the others ready on the local hdd.
Actually, no. Our goal is to revolutionize the Indian Internet, not restrict it - I could care less how you use my network, so long as the bill gets paid.
At this time I don't have my spreadsheets handy, but I anticipate 50GB with "unlimited speed" would be somewhere in the vicinity of Rs 4-5,000 per month.
Otherwise our nearest plan I think is either 4Mbit or 8Mbit with 40GB or 80GB respectively, coming in at about Rs6,000 for the latter. Our 2Mbit plan with 20GB I think is around Rs 2,000 - an extra 30GB would probably be about Rs 1,000-1,500, but don't quote me on that until I can get in front of my data. Our lowest connection is 1Mbit/10GB which I think is about Rs 1,300, and I am introducing a 512k connection for mobile only - I don't have a price for that yet, but be assured, we are doing everything to reduce the prices to the end user as much as possible.
I've also described in some of those threads about the costs of bandwidth in India and why it's so expensive. In short:
[*]About Rs 25 per gigabyte for a 622Mbits or about 194,000 gigabytes in a month divided by about Rs50 lakh per month.
[*]Rs 50 per gigabyte when peering with another Indian ISP at NIXI
[*]Laying fibre-optic cable (in Mumbai) is costing me US$1.2 lakh/Rs60 lakh per kilometre including the fibre itself (and we are planning to build enough capacity on each side of every street we go in to allow about 6400 people to simultaneously transmit over 100Mbits in/out constantly... which equates 32 Terabytes *each* per month, so... we think its sufficient for a while).
[*]Licensing and mandatory 8% revenue sharing with the government
[*]Overheads such as staff.
[/list]As you can see, a lot of factors come in to play, and if you do the math, you'll see why 50GB for under 3,000 per month becomes difficult to achieve until there are some changes at levels beyond my immediate control.
Additionally, in the long term, I think at least the cost of fibre is worth it, and if I can unseat the other ISPs, all the better (I know for a fact that Reliance is watching what I'm doing rather closely).
I started this project for a couple of reasons: to be cheaper and better than the competition by miles (not an entirely difficult task), and secondly to model our network on the European (specifically Scandinavian) model of distribution. I moved to India in November '08 having been living in Finland since 2005, where I had the opportunity to have multiple megabits on my cellphone (I had 2Mbits, unlimited data, cost of about Rs1800 per month, and I got good service even in the middle of nowhere). My home and office connections were even better - 24Mbits unlimited used to cost me about Rs 3500.
Anyway, check some other threads of mine around, I'm sure I've got some roughly accurate prices listed somewhere, and keep in mind that only bandwidth outside the network is charged - if you're downloading torrents, and it comes from another of my users, that bandwidth is not charged, which means that hopefully all prices would be reduced across the board due to lesser use of the international links.
Just so that you get some idea of my willingness to pay.. i used to pay Rs800 per term (3-4 months) for my school connection (they also had charges for other computational facilities, which ran into 1000s, ironically I never used them), right now, i am ready to fork out a lil over thousand per month for my proposed connection, mebbe a lill more than that if you can setup and sustain a very good DC++ user base .. is that too much to ask for?
With the model I have planned, DC++ won't be necessary, nor should it be too much to ask for. Torrents should be sufficient, and streaming media and HTTP transfers of most other large files (Microsoft Updates, Linux Distros etc) would be hosted and delivered locally thanks to a pending partnership with with a particular content-distribution-network.
Finally, a workplace is different from schools, you are expected to be at work 10 hrs a day, after that you pack your bags and leave for home... on the other hand, you are expected to "live" in a school for four months and then you get a measly month or a half of holidays.. so while considering the applicability of torrents, a workplace is not a good example for a student.
Apples and Oranges, one might say. But the argument is the same: If the relationship between you and school for internet access is like that of a customer-ISP relationship only, then by all means, I'm fine with torrents, because they can essentially "pass the buck", but if you're getting your net access for free and "abusing" it (for lack of a better word) by downloading torrents, then that's not as OK. Your description sounds like it was the former.
On the other hand, I plan to encourage file sharing on my network by allowing users on my network to share at full-speed, no matter what speed tier they have purchased - that speed tier is only enforced once their traffic leaves my network. Bit-torrent by its very nature looks for closest peers and seeds, and allowing transfers at full speed actually decreases overall congestion on the network because a 1GB transfer could be finished in 80 seconds or so, instead of 18 hours.
I wont find much use for the unlimited speed offer, considering the purpose of my downloads and the exorbitant prices that you may charge for them. Presently, for me the sweet spot would be 2mbps with 50gB of downloads per month... its just right for me, by the time I finish one anime or sitcom episode, the others ready on the local hdd.
Actually, no. Our goal is to revolutionize the Indian Internet, not restrict it - I could care less how you use my network, so long as the bill gets paid.
At this time I don't have my spreadsheets handy, but I anticipate 50GB with "unlimited speed" would be somewhere in the vicinity of Rs 4-5,000 per month.
Otherwise our nearest plan I think is either 4Mbit or 8Mbit with 40GB or 80GB respectively, coming in at about Rs6,000 for the latter. Our 2Mbit plan with 20GB I think is around Rs 2,000 - an extra 30GB would probably be about Rs 1,000-1,500, but don't quote me on that until I can get in front of my data. Our lowest connection is 1Mbit/10GB which I think is about Rs 1,300, and I am introducing a 512k connection for mobile only - I don't have a price for that yet, but be assured, we are doing everything to reduce the prices to the end user as much as possible.
I've also described in some of those threads about the costs of bandwidth in India and why it's so expensive. In short:
[*]About Rs 25 per gigabyte for a 622Mbits or about 194,000 gigabytes in a month divided by about Rs50 lakh per month.
[*]Rs 50 per gigabyte when peering with another Indian ISP at NIXI
[*]Laying fibre-optic cable (in Mumbai) is costing me US$1.2 lakh/Rs60 lakh per kilometre including the fibre itself (and we are planning to build enough capacity on each side of every street we go in to allow about 6400 people to simultaneously transmit over 100Mbits in/out constantly... which equates 32 Terabytes *each* per month, so... we think its sufficient for a while).
[*]Licensing and mandatory 8% revenue sharing with the government
[*]Overheads such as staff.
[/list]As you can see, a lot of factors come in to play, and if you do the math, you'll see why 50GB for under 3,000 per month becomes difficult to achieve until there are some changes at levels beyond my immediate control.
Additionally, in the long term, I think at least the cost of fibre is worth it, and if I can unseat the other ISPs, all the better (I know for a fact that Reliance is watching what I'm doing rather closely).
I started this project for a couple of reasons: to be cheaper and better than the competition by miles (not an entirely difficult task), and secondly to model our network on the European (specifically Scandinavian) model of distribution. I moved to India in November '08 having been living in Finland since 2005, where I had the opportunity to have multiple megabits on my cellphone (I had 2Mbits, unlimited data, cost of about Rs1800 per month, and I got good service even in the middle of nowhere). My home and office connections were even better - 24Mbits unlimited used to cost me about Rs 3500.
Anyway, check some other threads of mine around, I'm sure I've got some roughly accurate prices listed somewhere, and keep in mind that only bandwidth outside the network is charged - if you're downloading torrents, and it comes from another of my users, that bandwidth is not charged, which means that hopefully all prices would be reduced across the board due to lesser use of the international links.
Just so that you get some idea of my willingness to pay.. i used to pay Rs800 per term (3-4 months) for my school connection (they also had charges for other computational facilities, which ran into 1000s, ironically I never used them), right now, i am ready to fork out a lil over thousand per month for my proposed connection, mebbe a lill more than that if you can setup and sustain a very good DC++ user base .. is that too much to ask for?
With the model I have planned, DC++ won't be necessary, nor should it be too much to ask for. Torrents should be sufficient, and streaming media and HTTP transfers of most other large files (Microsoft Updates, Linux Distros etc) would be hosted and delivered locally thanks to a pending partnership with with a particular content-distribution-network.
Finally, a workplace is different from schools, you are expected to be at work 10 hrs a day, after that you pack your bags and leave for home... on the other hand, you are expected to "live" in a school for four months and then you get a measly month or a half of holidays.. so while considering the applicability of torrents, a workplace is not a good example for a student.
Apples and Oranges, one might say. But the argument is the same: If the relationship between you and school for internet access is like that of a customer-ISP relationship only, then by all means, I'm fine with torrents, because they can essentially "pass the buck", but if you're getting your net access for free and "abusing" it (for lack of a better word) by downloading torrents, then that's not as OK. Your description sounds like it was the former.
On the other hand, I plan to encourage file sharing on my network by allowing users on my network to share at full-speed, no matter what speed tier they have purchased - that speed tier is only enforced once their traffic leaves my network. Bit-torrent by its very nature looks for closest peers and seeds, and allowing transfers at full speed actually decreases overall congestion on the network because a 1GB transfer could be finished in 80 seconds or so, instead of 18 hours.
ut is typically about 4:1, meaning for every 4GB in, I would probably pay directly for 3GB. Plus Rs 6 lakh per 
