A First Date, The First Night and the First Switching ON of a High Speed DSL have one thing in common….the anticipation

And BSNL had plenty of bandwidth in its network. Afterall, all the private Telcos had shouted themselves hoarse for the unbundling of the Telco’s last mile infrastructure.

What can I say, it was one hell of an anti-climax. Speed was about 20-30 KB during the daytime, 50 KB at the max. and 120-200 KB late in the time, like 2 AM. Hell, my Home 500 Plan was faster.

But, Hope is eternal. I decided it only needed trouble shooting and BSNL would do it in no time at all….afterall hadn’t the customer service at the lineman level improved so much lately? It was going to be a couple of days more wait, then I would really experience the blazing-fast Internet, I had only dreamed about!

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When you are going to get a much desired toy, you cannot wait. I was like that.  A week had gone by, And no news from BSNL, period!

I deputed a person from my staff to followup and ultimately the day arrived…..a person, a Mr. Rajesh Kumar from BSNL had come to install the connection. Since the phone line was already installed and a lineman had not come earlier to install the splitter, he decided to come the next day. After he went, I realized that since I had not opted for a BSNL router, splitter too would have to be provided by me and I could have installed it myself. Anyways, I kept the splitter & the internal wiring ready and the lineman came and connected it to the mains wiring.

Next day Mr. Rajesh Kumar came and tried to setup the connection. A working Huawei router on my other Home 500 Plan was used for the installation, but it simply wouldn’t work, so Mr. Rajesh decided to boot it to default factory settings….and the firmware became corrupted. The router would not even accept the ppoe settings through its web interface. So Mr. Rajesh put the router on bridging mode and used software authentication/login from the computer itself. I now had to buy a new router and he would come again to set it up again.

I bought a new router next day, installed it using always on feature and ppoe authentication from the router itself. Static IP was to be set up when Mr. Rajesh arrived again, but meanwhile, I was going to just experience some blazing-fast Internet, I had only dreamed about ;-))

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This multi-part post is the story of my acquiring a high speed broadband connection from BSNL, in my hometown, Amritsar. In the true spirit of new age Reality shows, I will post updates as events occur. The first few posts are of course, narrative of events that have happened till date.

I wanted a high speed connection with Static IPs, so I could setup my own servers….options were:

I selected the Business 4000 Plan. However, I wanted more than one IP, so that I could setup my own DNS Servers. However, being a Govt. organization BSNL could not even consider it.

I would like to mention here that I have had DSL connection from HFCL Connect, a private sector company in Punjab, which provided Static IPs on an extra charge of Rs 2500 per IP/year. Exorbitant as it was, additional static IPs could be had. And the service provider garnered additional revenue on the same resources.

I offered to pay extra for the extra IP, but then extra revenue & profitability are not essential considerations in BSNL policy-making.

So, I went ahead and applied for the Business 4000 Plan…..and dreamed of blazing-fast Internet Connectivity.

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This is a story of my various interactions with Indian Telecom majors as a SME customer. Most of these companies have a Customer Satisfaction Initiative and some of these pride themselves on their service delivery. One has outsourced its entire IT backend to a major IT giant, the Big Blue - IBM.

These companies employ the best brains in the country & hire the best consultants that money can hire and still fail at a basic marketing principal - Retain a customer rather than acquire a new one.

My motive is not to bad-mouth these companies. Some of these are really good. My motive is to highlight something that should be resolved, if these companies wish to reduce customer churn and save associated costs. Nor am I asking any kind of apology or action. The market competition will automatically empower me & other customers, the moment Number Portability kicks in.

Read on…..and do register & post your comments.

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I bought an Apple MacBook Pro last month, during a trip to Dubai. It cost an arm & a leg, though much cheaper than what it costs in India. Though why pricing of a high-end consumer product be higher in India, where there’s a bigger market, lower Retail Costs & lower Salaries than in Dubai, really has me beat.

I first used Mac, about eight years back, for a couple of hours, in a Cybercafe, also in Dubai. I was very impressed by the Mac Desktop compared to the Windows Desktop then. The same is the case today, the Graphics are really impressive, though the amount of relearning that our habits inculcated by our extensive use of Windows, is also phenomenal.

The machine is a 2.5 MHz Intel Processor, with 4 GB RAM (I got them to upgrade the RAM from the Standard 2 GB) and a barracuda, if I may say so, even if after a month, lot of my enthusiasm for the machine has cooled off. But then, after spending so much moolah on the Tiger, I can’t really say that I made a mistake….or can I? Well, its not all white & black, lots of Grays in between, as you will see, as you go through the posts in this series.

Now that I am back in India, I am intending this multi-post review for those who are thinking of buying an Apple. The review takes into account only my point of view, your mileage may vary.

I am a die-hard Linux user, with a major exposure to Windoze. So that is going to my point of view, the Linux & Windows user’s perspective.

I hope you enjoy the series (posts), coming up slowly in the next week. Do give your comments.

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