TRAI to redefine "broadband"

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Well ina way trai is here to make new only...

Wat can it do?? It cant go @each persons home and check the speeds...
maybe they'l ven do it once wat after that?? downtime of 3-4day amonth is not uncommon...

The solution lies with us consumers...Instead of shouting our asses off over here, we should get together and take these companies to the consumer courts/forum...Fighting together is wat it takes...

Maybe they'l escape but once they know people arent goin to take their crap, they'll HAVE to buck up and improve their service...
 
thanks mate. very nice article and i hope operators shud follow those rules too. mtnl is not out with any of the mid segment 512 or higher unlimited download plan as of now. hope this year brings some boom in internet market.
 
The real issue here is how do they define best efforts. Everywhere in the world, speed is not guaranteed, but it usually comes close to 80% of what they claim, which is acceptable. As for limits, I don't think TRAI should really be in the business of defining whether there should be caps or not - that should be based on the plan you pay for. What they do need to do is perhaps make sure that ridiculously low limits are not allowed - what is the use of a 100 MB/month broadband connection? If you have such low traffic, non-broadband would do. The companies should be allowed to offer such plans (because there are people who do not do much apart from check email), but they shouldn't be called broadband.
 
Also those who say there are limits everywhere, well yes. But everywhere they do have 4mbps unlimited plan at reasonable cost as well.

My friend pays 29 pounds which is close to Rs.2400 in UK for his connection. Sounds expensive? well its 8mbps. For 8mbps i will gladly pay that amount.

Also the net penetration in metros is good. Almost everyone I know has PC and some sort of broadband connection here.

So there is huge market base here. But does that change things here? No it does not. We didnt have anything other than POS sify here until last month when Reliance launched wimax.

MTNL refuses to offer even 2mbps NU plan to me even after paying for it and complaining about it 1000 times. Thats the state of broadband here.

And unless TRAI sets some firm quality guidelines, its not going to change.

There should be financial penalties to the companies when they fail to provide proper service.

Some quality norms must be set like 97% uptime ( the international standard is higher than this but usually 3-5% downtime is considered as good service ), minimum tolerable speed etc.

Unless these steps, the ISPs will not provide us real net experience.

I am really hoping Reliance and Tata becomes more aggressive and change this sector like they changed the telecom.
 
I think BSNL/MTNL just followed Reliance's template of the BB plans where every extra unit over the datacap was charged an obscene amount of money which led to people who had no idea regarding bandwidth getting 4-5k bills in the very first month. I've seen this happen time and time again. I keep telling them that 1gb isn't enough and they respond with something like "I use it only for chatting" etc. There was even a BSNL GM(a year back) who wondered why people have problem with the 1gb limit when most computers themselves have only 10gb capacity.

In fact I'm pretty sure that if BSNL/MTNL were the ones to introduce BB here then the concept of datalimits wouldn't even have been there.
 
eh? Reliance's template????

Reliance is newest of the lot to jump into consumer broadband arena. They are quiet new.

Originally Sify was the one who jumped into the broadband with their stupid 150mb a day limit during day time followed by Airtel ( first to offer real unlimited 256k connection ), Hathway, Exatt, then came tata/VSNL, MTNL and BSNL and then came reliance.

MTNL / BSNL started sometime in 2006 iirc. Followed by reliance wired connection and just few months back their wimax started.
 
I believe companies like Airtel, TATA and Reliance have the funds AND the bandwidth (craploads of it) to change Indian broadband completely. The only reason they haven't done it yet is because of their low coverage area. Even then, they've managed to bite a big chunk out of the crappier ISPs share :P

My interest in Wimax is not so much in the technology but in how easy it will be for ISPs to expand into new areas without having to go through the trouble of laying cables on roads and over buildings and covering large areas. This means very soon you can actually have your favorite - TATA/Reliance/Airtel (if they are Wimax) connections in every town in the cities at least. So say your TATA connection isn't working as well one month. Big deal? Go to your local Reliance office, get a new connection the same day. This kind of flexibility and competition will hopefully force ISPs to give very good service.
 
I agree to this fact tht companies are afraid to jump into this business because of their low coverage area. The simple example is in front of me is Airtel. Its not yet given the BB connection in many parts of Walled City Area. That's the reason ppl have to opt for MTNL plans. I know tht Airtel has comeup with 512kbps unlimited plan but i am helpless as they don't have their service in our area. I am working with MTNL helplessly even asking from MTNL ppl for higher plans even afte agreeing to pay the amount they are not willing to go ahead.

In my opinion the suggestions tht we all are giving here, we shud combine them all together and send a letter to TRAI with our signatures. May be some sort of action may built up by this step. What to you say Techies?
 
^^Good Idea, But it wont be easy to get signatures...(i hope u're not talking about the profile sigs :ohyeah: ) ....by the way this is a good step, but I don't see much happening in this regard. I for one own a Reliance BROADNET connection and get blazing downloads at 75kbps :tongue: :tongue: the upload cap is supposedly 40kbps but i can sumhow upload at nearly 75 k too...so @ least my ratios are good....I would really love to have even a 256k...........currently a 700mb dl takes around 30 hours.....

And believe it or not: I dowload ~15GB every month...=> nearly 25-30gb data transfer....... good enough for the money I guess.

cyberjunkie said:
Go to your local Reliance office, get a new connection the same day.
Click to expand...

^^ Reliance will have to step their customer service up by quite a few notches for that to be possible....currently their customer support is crap. It took me nearly 20 days to get my wired connection.
 
Just an example Neotheone, Wimax requires a setup that should take 5mins to do.

@tusharrastogi - I'm in, but it will have to be much more elaborate yet simple to understand. There has to be willingness on TRAI's part to take it seriously and be quick in implementing the changes if they think it all makes sense.

My proposal of some of the points that need to be emphasised

1. Current status of ISPs and the schemes. Problems faced by users - downtime, pathetic speeds, routing of data and so on.

2. Comparison of scheme speeds and prices with other countries (not just any country, the developing countries like ourselves).

3. Make a breakdown of bulk bandwidth costs and how much it translates into per end user cost (We'll need some approximate rates). If the prices are extremely high, then we break it to an approximate suitable price with a fair margin for ISPs. TRAI can try and use this pricing as a rough reference point.

4. Explain how a typical techie person spends his time and how it is important to make broadband and Internet access A LOT MORE easier and cheaper to unlock the potential of general public, not just techies. Explain why its important to have unlimited 24/7 connections and not 8Mbps connections with 2GB and 3GB download limits. If download limit scheme are implemented, sensible limits ought to be put. Say 30GB on a 1Mbps connection priced at Rs. 600. An Unlimited 1Mbps can probably do well over 550-600GB a month if left on 24/7.

5. Ridiculous download limits schemes - Give a list of schemes and the limits and the approx time it would take to exhaust the connection. Also add in the whole pricing side of it. eg. I take a 2Mbps line with 1GB limit. Assume that I get 220KB/s. The 1GB won't last me more than an hour and a half. For an hour and a half of 220KB/s, I'm expected to pay Rs. 800? Is that what it REALLY costs the ISP?

It has to be much more detailed but these are just some of the things we could talk about.
 
putting a download limit is like taking my freedom and right to access web... text pages of browsing should not be capped ... html pages should not be counted
 
^^ Very good points. But the problem is that TRAI is not likely to look into the specific problems of the avanced users. They simply do not make policies according to the "downloaders" . Their primary aim is to enhance the spread of internet as a medium of information , education and hence empowerment. so they are not likely to be too strict on the ISP's. Besides, you can always count on the fact that these corporates will find a workaround for any rule...remember that there is already a minimum cap of 256k but many have sub 100k connections in the name of broadband.

By the way cyberjunkie, yaar even my wired connection took less than 5 mins to actually set up. He just had to connect te wires to my NIC through the ADSL modem and voila ! ...It was working ! (By default windows aquires IP through DHCP which was the only required setting.)

putting a download limit is like taking my freedom and right to access web... text pages of browsing should not be capped ... html pages should not be counted
Click to expand...

If that is done, There may be ways of exploiting this to download gigs of data without paying....If I am right, enabling encryption makes the p2p traffic "appear" like http traffic. Please correct me If I am wrong.
 
Those who want the 1Mbps and 2Mbps Ultd lines are the more geeky downloading / browsing types like ourselves. Most of us are willing to pay the 1-1.5k for a 1/2Mbps unlimited connection. ISPs have the bandwidth and can give 256kbps Ultd for half or even lower rates. A price tag of Rs. 400 for example for 256kbps unlimited could be the ultimate move to benefit and get large numbers of eager minds online. One time Rs. 400-no-hassles connection sounds a lot nicer than the current scenario- Here take 2Mbps for 400. Its very fast. It should be enough for you to check your e-mail 2 times a day and maybe a handful of sites. But remember! Cross 500MB and then you will be billed Rs.1/MB! Poor chap probably spends his online time worrying about how much beyond his limit he's crossing.
 
poor chaps get cought in chirkut's self refresh pages and end up vanishing the limit in few days.. rest is done by IM like yahoo messenger.. i personally thing the Yahoo IM and toolbar are spamware.

what did hapen to tata and relience ka 6Rs wala optical line running all over mumbai god knows they should atlest use it as MAN network...**** the plactic fibers cheap but the costly lasers got them on wrong foot i guess

wi-max will reduce the coverage area bottleneck that exist in vast parts on Bombay and other metros

but the big Q is will people like me on third floor of a 7 floor building receive a descent signal when there are sky scrappers growing up all around .. i thing wired would be needed for people on lower floors and also most commercial shops which are mostly on ground floor
 
If you can get cellphone reception somewhere, then you should be able to get WiMax too (I mean that it is physically possible, not that the service is going to be available)
 
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