Recently, I switched to BSNL DataOne Broadband connection from Beam Cable System. Though I was little apprehensive of BSNL, it was a pleasant surprise to see them being very responsive and prompt in initiating a new connection.
I am very impressed with the overall speed and the throughput that I have been getting. Never ever thought that the same wire which gave us that crawling 28.8K speed over the dial-up link can also give an amazing 384K speed.
It took me quite sometime to understand and optimize the broadband connectivity parameters. My requirements are not very different from what many home users would want. I was looking for the following:
1) Avoid extra cabling into home: This has been an issue with my previous provider. He had a fiber-optic cable running into my apartment where he put a switch and distributed CAT 5 cables with a RJ 45 plug into the subscriber’s flat. He ran a long cable into my computer room and later when we shifted the PC to another room, it was getting little cluttered. I am yet to see any flat that has structured CAT 5 cabling! Since I decided to go for a BSNL landline, I thought I can save on the cable and also it is fairly easy to shift the computer to any other room that has a telephone RJ 11 terminal.
2) Share the connection across couple of machines: This was another huge issue with my previous provider. He put the MAC address filtering on the server and it was a pain to share the connection across my notebook PC and my Home PC.
3) Always ON and NO dialer: I hated the dialer that Beam forced me to use. It was hogging memory and did nasty things like blocking all ports and all Ethernet interfaces. This means I could not use VPCs and create a virtual network between my host OS and guest OSs. This dialer actually blocked my loopback adapter interface. I had a demo the next day where I had to show my favorite Linux and Windows Interop demo through VPCs. When I confidently started the demo and tried to call a web service on my host from Linux, it failed! It was quite embarrassing to debug the problem in front of 250+ audiences during TechEd in Mumbai last year.
4) Avoid paying one more extra bill: I prefer reducing the no. of bills that I may have to pay in the first week of every month. During the monthly collection, if my house was locked, Beam was expecting me to come all the way and pay the bill. I just hate this. Switching to BSNL combines my phone and internet bill into one.
5) Dynamic IP and Zero configuration: As a laptop user, I plug into more than one network. My corporate network is DHCP enabled while my home network expects me to have a static IP. This was another thing that I hated with Beam. I wanted a simple plug-n-play network connectivity instead of changing the network properties twice a day.
In my next post, I will share how I configured my ADSL modem and the Wireless router together to provide me a hassle-free high speed connectivity.
