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After being panned here on this broadband forum for next to nil customer response for dial up, VSNL was a forgotten “also ran”. Tata’s didn’t seem to have any customer orientation in place and it seemed to be floundering.
I was told that it’s Metro Ethernet plans were in place and it’s slowly scaling up. For the un initiated, Metro Ethernet is a part of Wide Area Network. You can read more here. Wikipedia has some more information on Wide Area Netowrks or WAN.
I saw their advertisement in a newspaper where they are bundling Pentium PC’s with their services. This of course, spiked my interest and saw their home page. While it’s overtly flash, the only thing that excited was the value added services. I shall come to it a little later.
Someone surely must have figured out the pros of having the same which would help them in the long run. Specially when the rates are destined to fall in the near future. Of course, on their tariffs page they are marketing 64k as “broadband” of whatever version they claim to be as. The unlimited 256k retails for 1.6k which is expensive in my opinion.
Has anyone used it so far?
Finally it’s the value added services that take the final cake. You have downloadable movies/ song selections et al. I haven’t used it and it seems to be restricted to the Tata subscribers only.
Frankly, I was on VSNL dial up for couple of months and it did make a lot of sense. Specially after the tyranny of BSNL dial up, it was a welcome relief. To that extent, I could vouchsafe for their services. They backed it up with a “customer care” which was patchy at best, but workable. If the things worked out, you wouldn’t ever need to call them ever.
Surprisingly, Tata’s are offering a whole gamut of services. With websitehosting to static IP on demand!
It leaves out Airtel/ Reliance and my all time favourite whipping boy BSNL out in the cold, leaving them to bite the dust. Strangely, I haven’t seen their advertisments as Airtel/ BSNL usually do. In the interim, I never bothered to check out the main VSNL home page either. Reliance would surely need a miracle to scale up. Unless they are ready to fight out the cheapstakes. VSNL remains the ugly sister of BSNL as ever. Does anyone know of their revision petition challenging TRAI’s order on bandwidth revision? No news, as far as I am aware of.
What’s more is the fact that they are planning to heavily leverage on Tata Indicom brand. Hmm,Tata’s coming out of the woods?
It would be interesting to watch their next step.