India Broadband

I’m almost surprised to see the average product rating for Sify Broadband coz my experiences with it has been somewhat different from most of the users posting their review here.

I’ve a 32 kbps unlimited (shared) connection @ Rs. 1166 p/m. (Surprisingly & to my delight) this has been reduced to Rs. 650 p/m from this month forth. The one time installation charge was Rs. 3000. The cable guy who is responsible for the installation & maintainence is helpful & does turn up when I ask for assistance.

Since I’m a computer enthusiast & an avid surfer, my habits require me to stay looong on internet, sometimes more than 12 hrs at a stretch. So for this I had to take a connection which could keep up with my habit & simultaneously not be too heavy on my pocket.

The Sify had following offers for me :
64 kbps -- 10hrs for 1 mth @ 299 or 20 hrs for 1 mth @ 499 or 40 hrs for 2 mth @ 800. 128 kbps --100 mb for 1 mth @ 300 or 300 mb for 1 mth @ 750,
256 kbps -- 400 mb for 1 mth @ 999 or 1 Gb for mth @ 2500
& ofcourse 32 kbps unlimited (shared) connection @ Rs. 1166 p/m (now 650).

So I chose this one. Coming to the most imp aspect of the connection, its speed & consistency, I’ll have to admit to that I got a much better deal that what I had bargained for. Although the connection says it runs at 32 kbps, most of the times I get speeds closer to 50-64 kbps. Even the most content rich web pages load pretty quickly & I can even view streaming video from web & listen to internet radio which broadcast at 32 kbps mark without any interference.

I can directly write emails being online without having to do the copy & paste stuff from text pad, unlike the days of dial up. The best of this connetion is its download speed. I mostly use DAP for my downloading & it almost always gives me an average speed of 64 kBps. (Yes , you read it right . 64 kBps. If you convert 32 kbps into kilo bytes, it turns out to be 4 kBps). Sometimes to my disbelief & to everybody else who will be reading this review the speed shoots up to 300 kBps. (I’ve even kept a screen shot of a download @ 291 kBps. but I’ve never shown it to the sify fellow & I never will). The connection is very reliable in terms of connectivity & is almost always connected. Once I faced some highly irregular connectivity & my connection provider almost got the whole wiring to my house changed (I consider that a very good customer service). Only later I found out that my network card was bad.

Anyways, just to give you a clue what I’ve achieved with my internet connection, heres a little summary. I’m a game enthsiast & I’ve downloaded really big game files from internet thanks to my Sify connection, for eg. Far Cry demo (508 mb) which took almost around 5hrs (only), Need for Speed Underground demo (234 mb, took around 5 hrs, result of a poor download server), Freedom fighters demo (76 mb, took around 45 mins), Hitman Contracts demo (200 mb, took around only 1.30 hrs at an average speed of 75 kBps) Max Payne 2 demo (230 mb , took around 4-5 hrs) etc etc etc. I’ve downloaded over 2 gb stuff in two months & I’ve not recieved any calls from Sify saying my usage is very much or things like that.

Infact, one time when I contacted customer care as I was having problems renewing my account, they turned out to be very helpful. Well, I really dont know the secret of this speed. My guess is that since its a shared connection & probably there may not be too many takers in my area for it, so I enjoy the whole bandwith & consequently a faster speed. Probably with no. of takers increasing by reading my review ( I guess so ), my connection speed may decrease (god forbid). Until then I would bask under the glory of my low advertised- high performer internet connection & I would say if you are thinking about Sify go for it, but certainly not if you live in my area. :-)