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Some of you will remember my post about BSNL Broadband.
A lot of people wrote in and narrated their experiences. Some of them good, some of them bad.
Here's my story:
Some Background
When I first moved into Sanjaynagar, I had ordered a second phone line for the eventuality of DSL connections becoming available in the future (this was in 2001/2002), and then had waited in vain for this to happen.
In the meanwhile, I cycled through several completely business-sense challenged cable internet guys. One lasted 4 months ("yes sir, we promised better than dialup speed, but you arent going to get more than 2400 bps. yessir, we are sorry. Sorry, no refunds").
The other one was a bit better, but by February this year, it was clear that they couldnt support their customers (try convincing me to pay a bill that showed that I had downloaded 270 MEGABYTES of stuff in my office, on Diwali day, when the office was closed, *and* on a connection that never exceeded 4 KB/sec). This apart from the fact that it took them about a month to give me a connection to begin with.
Their latest boo-boo was not sending me valid bills despite my earnest follow-up, and then sending me a nasty disconnection note. Guys - there is only so much abuse that I am going to take from you. You are history, too.
Anyway...
I was still holding back for a while, to see if things would degrade for BSNL dataone users once more people got on the network. Finally, about two months after BSNL announced the services, and after being jerked around by my incompetent cable ISP, I took the plunge and ordered myself a 384 kbps connection.
It was connected today, so I thought I'd document my experiences.
Dealing with BSNL
In a typical BSNL fashion, it was next to impossible to get the service. The exchanges and customer service centres didnt have the application forms, and the online info, which has a registration form, didnt result in any action either. Finally my exchange gave me some cheap photocopied forms to fill, sent me a demand note, which I paid, and then I sat back and held my breath.
Action happened fairly rapidly. The first signs were few confirmatory calls. They were quite an eye opener, because they showed me just how much times have changed - I was asked if I used Windows or Linux! I naturally answered the latter, and BSNL was totally OK with that.
On Thursday last week, I got a call asking whether it was OK to come over on Friday to set up the connection. Sadly, someone seemed to have missed that it was Good Friday, and therefore a holiday.
IAC, this morning I got another call, saying that the engineers would be over later this evening.
True to their word, by 6pm, I had BSNL guys in front of my door. One thing I have to remark on - BSNL has really the politest of people working for them now. They apologised for the delay (I was right - they had missed the Good Friday bit), then quickly got down to business.
Connecting
They quickly unpacked the Huawei SmartAX MT880 device (note the term!), plugged it in, and seconds later pronounced that the link was up. Cool. Now we connected it to the PC, and I waited for the painful part - installing software and drivers.
"No software, sir", says the polite BSNL dude.
Huh?
This is DSL, and several of my friends have BSNL DataOne connections, and they had to install PPPoE software to get things going (which was supplied by BSNL). You mean I had to source my own software and drivers? Not that I was worried - any decent Linux distro comes with everything I would ever need, but - hey, no software?
"No software sir, not needed".
Doh.
Suddenly a light went on over my head, and I picked up the device and had a look at it.
It wasn't a DSL modem.
It was a DSL router+modem.
No software required - just plug in your network cable, set your up LAN connection, and you are up and running.
As we say in German - "gesagt, getan" - I plugged in, and as first test downloaded a 40 MB file in a few minutes, averaging about 40 KiloBYTES a second.
Happiness.
Technical stuff
OK, so now some details for people looking for this kind of stuff:
My setup
To get my setup running at home, I did the following:
- Disabled the Huawei device's router capabilities, making it a raw pppoe DSL modem. You don't need to do this if you device was set up as non-routing DSL modem, which requires you to run a driver on your machine (something like WinPOET under Windows, and rp-pppoe under Linux).
- Configured my Linksys WRT54GS wireless router to talk pppoe over the WAN port, and connected it to the Huawei.
Everything worked as expected, and seconds later my Linksys was my primary router, connecting to BSNL Dataone and the Internet via the Huawei modem. One less hop to deal with, and the only private addresses are those from my wireless router.
Here is what the speed test said:
Communications 360.6 kilobits per second
Storage 44 kilobytes per second
1MB file download 23.3 seconds
Subjective rating Not bad
That's 93.8% of the rated speed that I had subscribed for.
I am now sitting in my garden with my wireless notebook, listening to streaming internet radio, browsing at high speed, and downloading huge files. No glitches so far.
And just to prove a point:
On Thursday, our faithful 29" TV smoked itself, and went off to the shop for repairs. So I have had no access to TV-based news, especially right now, when an earthquake in Sumatra seems to have just kicked off the possibility of another tsunami.
Yet I am watching BBC as I write this, in a window on my screen - streaming live video of their news coverage.
Ladies and gentlemen - Broadband Internet finally makes it to the Chitnis home at Sanjaynagar, Bangalore.
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