India Broadband

India Broadband

Sify Iways started their revolutionary broadband chains in 1998 and with over 1600 cafes even in small towns they are supposed to be a success.

I’ve been a member from 2002. Their excellent networking makes sure that I’m never away from a fast internet connection while I’m in Chennai. I personally think they outnumber ICICI atms there.

They are quite cheap compared to normal dialup connections that people normally use at homes, at about RS.20 per hour at peak time and Rs.15 (1pm-5 pm). They are very fast and due to roaming recharge in one city means I use it any where in India. They charge RS.5 for b/w laser print Rs.20 for <100mb CD burn and Rs.60 for geater capacity.

Now for the speeds, they are quite fast compared to DSL cafes and and normal download speeds are from 6kbps to 13 kbps(In your home or normal cafes they’d be 2kbps),and around 25kbps when exceptionally fast.They also offer webcam connections & headphones. The speeds ensure that I can hear to Yahoo! Launch without a hitch. They donot charge anything for Media transfer(flash,floppy) except for CD burns. Now for their cons, service is really bad when it comes to maintaining the cafes. Apart from spanking new cafes that work really well the old cafes speak of outdated systems that would bottleneck taking almost 2 mins to just open your browser!!.

Stained keyboards ,ball mouses that donot work,unusable floppy drives that groan like grinders have become all too common place. The one that takes the cake is you cannot complain directly to sify but only to the franchisee. The aforementioned problems have actually made me refrain from using it.

Also the introduction of Reliance webworlds with much better hardware(snazzy LCD screens, gaming accessories,customisable mouse) and even faster speeds and nifty features like pop up block makes it much better.