Broadband in India

The broadband market in India is growing rapidly but the service providers are not bracing themselves to the challenge of meeting this demand. Even if the number of providers are not umpteen, there are a number of small players. If you ask me how many good ones, hardly one or two.

I have been using broadband at home since November 2004. It was Airtel at first in Bangalore and then DataOne at Pune. Here is a comparison of these two major broadband players:

Airtel : (earlier was marketed under the brand Touchtel)
Customer Service : Very good. Resolve all the problems within the promised time. I have seen their excellent customer service in Bangalore as well as in Trichy.
Speed: Good. The 128 Kbps unlimited package is good.
Cost : If you go on the rental modem option, your bill would work close to Rs.740 every month which is way cheaper than BSNL.
Free Calls: Depends on the time of the year and scheme you take it under. Sometimes they give free calls worth Rs. 100. STD facility offered on the phone without any extra payment as in BSNL.
Installation/Security deposit : Many times during a year, they have promotion schemes under which you can get the security deposit waived off and you can get started by just paying for the installation..shouldn't go beyond Rs.750.
Downtime : This is one part I like about airtel. If the service is down for whatever reason, then they don't charge prorata for the time it was down.
Bill Payment : you can drop a cheque at any of the Airtel outlets or pay it online.
Service availability: Airtel had a lesser penetration as compared to BSNL. The broadband service was not available in Pune at all a year back because of which we were forced to choose BSNL. Even now, in the outskirts of cities, they do not have a service. This can be a major drawback if you don't live in a good location.
Installation time :This totally depends on where you live. If you live in an apartment that already has someone using Airtel broadband then it is just a matter of an hour or so to get you going. Otherwise, it takes them about 2-3 days to get the line and do the whole setup.

Only disadvantage: The only bad experience I have had with Airtel is in disconnection of the service. They ask you to place a request 15 days in advance and in this period it can be disconnected at any time and they fail to notify you before doing that. If they can improve their process so that the connection be disconnected on a specific day, then nothing like it.

BSNL's DataOne
BSNL's DataOne sucks. I strongly recommend against using this one. Unless and until you don't have any other broadband service provider in your area, you should not go with this one. In Pune, when we moved in, we did not have any other provider. We checked with Airtel, Tata Indicom, Sify etc etc.

BSNL is highly locale dependent so what I write here might not be applicable o where you live. i was quite impressed with their customer service for telephone line in Bangalore but at Pune, it is HORRIBLE.
Customer Service : Pathetic. They don't have a 24*7 helpline. The 1500 toll free number that offers assistance is of no use. You are redirected to a local number in the exchange that operates only between 10 and 5 with the usual chai breaks and no one answering the call. And when they do, they have no clues about your problem and put you onto another number that is so busy through the day that it took me 3 days to get through. By then the service got restored naturally.

Installation: If you can get the installation done, then consider yourself lucky. It took us 45 days, numerous visits and calls to the local exchange and sweet talk to get our land line installed. They did not have a lengthy wire nor a instrument so we gave them all the equipment they needed and to-fro transportation to get our line going. after this, getting the broadband connection was a nightmare. The same episode repeated and it was a good 4 months before we got the Internet connection at home.

Download limit -The Rs.1000 -256 Kbps option has a download limit of 2GB. It worked out pretty expensive for us. So we switched over to the unlimited 128 Kbps one. Th speeds during the day is less than 64 Kbps.

Cost : Works out to (Rs.999+service tax +modem+fixed broadband charges+telephone rental) Rs.1300 with a rental modem.

Installation Cost : Close to Rs.3500. Can't recollect the refundable part in this. They hardly ever have any offer to waive of installation cost, security deposit etc..Getting the refundable part would be another nightmare.

Monthly bill payment : You have to physically pay the amount in counters or drop a cheque. Online payment not available in Pune. They do not have tie ups with any bank either such as ICICI or Citibank. So that's an inconvenience. Bill generation is another flawed process. We did no receive a bill the first 2 months despite following up. But they were prompt in disconnecting the connection.

Service Availability :The service is available even in the suburbs so that kinda works to their advantage against other players.
Downtime :The service is down atleast 2 days in a month and no one seems to be aware of it either. You just have to wait it out till it gets fixed.

I have not personally used Sify, Tata Indicome or Iqara. From what I hear from friends, Sify was good earlier but is not recommended anymore. Tata Indicom was never good. The same with Iqara. So before you go for one, enquire in your locality or city as to what is good to stay connected.