Trust me, it's the mediation that is the hardest part - ie - the process of parsing the huge sets of CDRs generated for the usage logs (from the proxies or routers or gateways or whatever) and then aggregating them and uploading them into the Billing system in a format that it understands - billing s/w are dumb 
. Mind you the CDRs are in binary and the format differs for each device. Billing and Mediation needs to be in alpha atleast for a couple of months and then an internal beta for the same duration for all the trivial issues to get sorted out - as I said yesterday, else you're gonna have customers getting bills of 6 digits or even negative numbers - and that can backfire with a lot of negative PR about their service - so they're not going to take a risk unless they fix up and get sure and feel sure again and more and again... They should'nt mind about 2000 geeks like us using say about 10 G/month for just 500 Rs as they will anyway make up in the long run - what makes you think I will reduce my usage once I get hooked after all. Regarding whether they are collecting the usage data - you betcha - they use tapes to store close to 10 million CDRs a day and they will be processing them internally - but just not going to charge anyone till they make things work properly down to the right decimal point. Also, the only thing they bother about as of now is getting a huge subscriber base - they need 5 million users surely to even break even on their infrastructure costs that they have already spent - and they cant risk losing existing subscribers due to some minor inconvenience caused - after all they cant spend millions on marketing and need to depend on viral marketing to get the initial base - like me telling 10 of my friends that I like BSNL and them all telling 10 friends each and so on over time. One more thing - the guy was saying that they are also thinking of giving away an unlimited connection for a nominal price (could be upwards of 3K though) to home users - can someone confirm that please if you know. Anyway, just my 2 cents...Feel free to disagree and throw it at me...
. Mind you the CDRs are in binary and the format differs for each device. Billing and Mediation needs to be in alpha atleast for a couple of months and then an internal beta for the same duration for all the trivial issues to get sorted out - as I said yesterday, else you're gonna have customers getting bills of 6 digits or even negative numbers - and that can backfire with a lot of negative PR about their service - so they're not going to take a risk unless they fix up and get sure and feel sure again and more and again... They should'nt mind about 2000 geeks like us using say about 10 G/month for just 500 Rs as they will anyway make up in the long run - what makes you think I will reduce my usage once I get hooked after all. Regarding whether they are collecting the usage data - you betcha - they use tapes to store close to 10 million CDRs a day and they will be processing them internally - but just not going to charge anyone till they make things work properly down to the right decimal point. Also, the only thing they bother about as of now is getting a huge subscriber base - they need 5 million users surely to even break even on their infrastructure costs that they have already spent - and they cant risk losing existing subscribers due to some minor inconvenience caused - after all they cant spend millions on marketing and need to depend on viral marketing to get the initial base - like me telling 10 of my friends that I like BSNL and them all telling 10 friends each and so on over time. One more thing - the guy was saying that they are also thinking of giving away an unlimited connection for a nominal price (could be upwards of 3K though) to home users - can someone confirm that please if you know. Anyway, just my 2 cents...Feel free to disagree and throw it at me...