My Broadband Experience

[Sanemi]

Hi everyone,

I’m based in Kerala and over the past few months, I’ve been trying out different broadband ISPs to find something that offers good latency, stable IPv6, and reliable support. I’ve used RailWire, BSNL, Xtranet, and Kerala Vision — and I thought I’d share my experience with each, in case it helps others in the same situation.


BSNL
Out of all the providers I tried, BSNL has been the worst. The IP addresses they assign behave differently — sometimes latency is okay, other times it’s terrible. IPv6 is pretty much unusable. YouTube starts buffering as soon as it’s turned on, and a lot of websites simply don’t load. I reported these issues to their staff multiple times, but they didn’t understand what I was talking about and never followed up.


RailWire
RailWire uses Jio as their upstream, and that made a big difference. I noticed IPv4 and IPv6 latencies were nearly identical, which is rare. When I used RailWire in May and June, I initially had some IPv6 issues, but after I contacted customer care and followed up with an email, they actually fixed it. They even gave me a gaming IP on request, and the connection was solid.

However, when I recharged the connection again in July, the IPv6 issues came back. IPv6 gets assigned, but only Google and YouTube seem to work — everything else fails to load. I reported it again, gave them traceroutes and screenshots. The customer care team said they would escalate it, but I haven’t heard back since.


Xtranet (AS133301)
Xtranet is probably the cheapest ISP I’ve seen here — ₹600 for 100 Mbps. The experience was okay overall. I had some latency issues, especially to international destinations, so I asked them if they could give me Airtel transit instead of Tata. They were actually responsive and gave me a free static IP to test, but that IP was still using Tata upstream. I confirmed it with their support team. IPv6 works, but I consistently see about 20 to 30 ms higher latency compared to IPv4.


Kerala Vision (AS138754)
Many LCOs here try to push Kerala Vision because they get a good commission from them. It’s the only ISP in Kerala that claims to have Cloudflare peering in Kochi and Kannur, so I thought that would help with DNS resolution and latency. But in reality, most of the time my connection still ended up routing through Mumbai or Chennai.

Performance was average, very similar to Xtranet. But what really made it worse was that they use BSNL transit for some routes, like AWS Singapore. That gave me almost 150 ms latency to Singapore, which is way too high. IPv6 performance was also bad. They seem to change transit providers dynamically, which makes routing unpredictable on both IPv4 and IPv6.

Latency Summary (From Kerala, based on my tests):

Singapore: RailWire 47–60 ms, Xtranet 70–90 ms, Kerala Vision up to 150 ms (via BSNL)

Japan: 120–140 ms across the board

London: 150–220 ms depending on ISP and time

IPv6: RailWire (when working) was as good as IPv4, Xtranet had 20–30 ms more, Kerala Vision was unstable

Note:
Drafted with the help of ChatGPT and based entirely on my personal experience and opinion.

 

[Sanemi]

Update : ISP Speed Run

After my first round of tests, I thought, “Let’s see who actually knows how to fix things,” and decided to contact every ISP I’d used before plus Asianet Broadband (AS17465) all within a short span. Not chasing speed records here, just a working IPv6/IPv4 without headache latency.


Asianet

Had them before. Same old story: ₹500 for activation or even a plan change. I emailed, called, and even reached the NOC head and a manager. They were polite, promised they’d sort it all out… and then nothing. Same issues weeks later.
Trying to disconnect with them was even more painful than BSNL — lots of conditions, delays, and back-and-forth.


Kerala Vision

I went straight to their L3 Thrissur NOC. They did respond, but it turned into an endless support loop: L1, L2, L3, then back to L1 again. Everyone asked the same questions like we’d never spoken before.

They collected my traceroutes twice and eventually said they wanted to “check my ONU” (Netlink in bridge mode). I told them: ONU is fine, LCO network is fine — the problem’s yours. Either fix it or drop it. They picked “drop it” and vanished.

RailWire

The Kerala RailWire team? Pretty much a ghost. I even called their NOC staff once — he picked up but stayed completely silent. Not even a hello.

My IPv6 issue only got fixed because I skipped the Kerala team entirely and contacted SRIT Karnataka, who actually run RailWire here. They solved it quickly. Only downside is the upstream roulette: I get Jio, while other districts get Airtel.

Xtranet

This one was a pleasant surprise. I got in touch with someone at Xtranet who actually knew what they were doing. Reported my issue, and they worked on it right away. Even helped me switch my routing from Tata (their default) to Airtel, which made a big difference

Currently I use Railwire as primary and Xtranet as Secondary

I also reported Railwire for a unified upstream or give me Airtel upstream