Thursday, January 04, 2007

Where is the Promised 2mbs?

I have been eagerly waiting for the promised 2 mbs broadband connectivity from BSNL. But so far, I haven't seen anything close to that speed.
Where is the promised Speed
My son & I have been periodically checking the speed and the maximum we have seen is around 100 kbs. So, I wonder where is the promised speed?

I understand the promised enhancement in speed is only till the BSNL servers (I don't have anyway of testing that segment alone) and my test would have gone to some server in US. But what good is blazing speed till my ISP, if it chokes from there.

Indian Broadband can definitely benefit from the increase speed, but what is needed even more and on a urgent basis is a bigger pipe in to the global internet backbone. Majority of the content accessed from India actually comes from outside (mainly from US) and therein lies the actual speed problem.

7 comments:

  1. Visu, It varies all the time, check it out a few times and see what you get.

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  2. Perhaps a visit to BSNL service center may help you. I believe they may have a different hardware to go with high speed internet that BSNL promises in their website.

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  3. Narayanan
    We have been checking quite regularly and it has never gone past 100 kbs anytime.. I consistently get around 50kbs.. Now, it is possible that I need to upgrade my modem hardware to get the promised 'blazing' speed..

    Anonymous
    Good Point.. I will check that angle..

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  4. Ram..surpisingly my AIRTEL 128Kbps connection shows 132 Kbps !!!

    BSNL has announced this scheme without checking whether modems can operate or whether their backend infrastructure supports this...plus with the Taiwan earthquake and consequent slowdown in bandwidht Iam highly skeptical about BSNL's claims.

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  5. Arvind

    Yeah.. Don't know what kind of infrastructure changes required.. but I am not seeing any difference in my connection at home..

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  6. I've been facing this exact same problem. However, to BSNL's credit, sometime last week, I was able to get download speeds of around 200-240 kilobytes per second (kBps), which is close to the 2 megabits per second (Mbps) that BSNL promised.

    I should also not forget to mention that BSNL has put up on its website "wherever technically feasible"

    One more point to be noted, the unlimited plans (Rs. 900/month) of BSNL are still at 256 kbps only, while the other plans are upto 2 Mbps.

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  7. Nirenjan

    Hmm.. thanks for the clarification.. I am on the unlimited plan..so it is still 256 kbs...

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