India Broadband

India Broadband

WARNING: This review gets quite technical towards the end !

An Overview
===========
I have finished my studies in London, UK and I have gone back to India to visit my family. As I was a broadband user in London, I was hoping to have similar connectivity here. I was pleasantly surprised to note that Cable and DSL broadband was available here. Since I used a Cable modem provider in the UK, I chose broadband over Cable as an option.

The Package
===========
I have gone for the Residential Silver Value Package, which costs 1500 Rs. per month. You get 128Kbps up and down, which is the speed of two ISDN modems working together or being able to download a file at 18 Kb/sec (under very optimal conditions). Even though the technology may be broadband, the speed itself is not even close to what can be achieved by using this technology. I used to have a 128Kbps upload speed and a 512Kbps download speed in the UK. In other parts of the world, higher speeds are possible, such as 256Kbps to 2.5Mbit. Apart from that, you get a Cable modem made by Motorola (SB4200 Surfboard), which you can buy for 7800 Rs. or rent from them for a deposit of 3000 Rs. and 500 Rs. per month. You also get 1 e-mail address, which can only be used via a webmail facility provided via their web-site. That means you can’t use your favourite mail client such as Outlook Express for Windows or KMail / Sylpheed for Linux.
It is possible to attach multiple computers to this connection with the purchase of a cable router, which they provide for 35000 Rs. or you can rent it for 1000 Rs. per month and a deposit of 15000 Rs. If you have your own cable router (like I do), it is not possible to use it, since they block your connection on their end. Given the fact that all UK providers and most US providers allow the subscriber to use a residential cable router (purchased from Linksys or Netgear, for example), I was disappointed not to be able to use my Desktop and laptop together.
The installation was meant to have been done 3 days after I talked to the sales rep, but an engineer came around 2 weeks later after a number of complaints to customer services and a call to the Business Manager of Operations.

Again, I was disappointed to note that Hathway (and similar broadband providers) have a limited download quota of 1 Gb.
For someone, who spends his/her time chatting and visiting the odd web-site, this would be sufficient, but for someone who downloads whole Linux distributions (1 CD image = 650Mb to 700Mb+) and participates in online discussions and volunteer software projects, this can be easily filled in less than a month. It is possible to get the Corporate Gold Value package, with no download quota, but with a hefty 10000 Rs. per month price tag for the same 128Kbps is quite pathetic and can be viewed as extortion.
The option to increase the quota by Gigabytes on the residential packages would be a nice feature addition.
Their reliability thus far has been excellent, I have had only 3 outages in the past 3 months each one lasting only 10 minutes.

I Have A Need, The Need For Speed
=================================
If you are accessing web-sites or services within India, the overall download speed and responsiveness of web-sites is quite good. But if you are accessing sites outside of India, you are looking at high latency (delay), packet loss (loss of information to or from a site) and subsequently slow download speeds. In the early evening hours (5:30 PM onwards), this becomes quite noticeable since more people go online (search on http://www.whatis.com for ’’Cable modem technology’’ for more info). Given the fact that VSNL provides Hathway with overseas connectivity and VSNL is a key participant in this telco monopoly and can therefore dictate prices, Hathway’s overseas connection is probably quite limited in bandwidth. To see what I mean, use a traceroute program to trace your connection to a foreign web-site such as www.hotmail.com. Latency and packet loss increases exponentially once you go beyond the last VSNL server/router. This could be because Hathway’s overseas line is not fast enough for the amount of subscribers they have or they cannot afford to upgrade the line due to a high price set by VSNL. Then again, maybe Hathway cannot be bothered. It depends on how cynical you are . You be/are the judge.

Everything Must Come to an End
==============================
A potentially great service, although they should have a look abroad for ideas on how to enhance their service.
They are not the only service in this part of India (Chennai), if they don’t add more value-added services I will find someone who will. For expats, Hathway is not the first choice, but a very close second.