I never thought that BSNL, the world’s crappiest broadband service, can get any more crappier, but it did. BSNL DataOne is notorious for rapidly switching between up and down states, so fast that it will make your head dizzy. How deep is the connectivity problem with BSNL DataOne? I decided to collect some hard statistics using a simple ping (with 2 second timeout) over the BSNL connection every 10 seconds to an always-on site like yahoo.com and I present you here with the data for last 2592 minutes (over 43 hours).
Test parameters and baseline data
Duration of BSNL DataOne Connectivity Test: 2592 minutes (over 43 hours)
Ping interval: 10 seconds
Ping timeout: 2 seconds
Normal average ping response time: 300 milliseconds
Test results
Total pings: 15557
Total available pings (uptime): 2876
Percentage of BSNL DataOne uptime: 18%
Add to it the fact that BSNL doesn’t have a customer service, unless you consider the robot who simply takes down the complaint (the complaint never gets addressed) and assigns you a number as customer service.
Now you decide whether you want to get BSNL Dataone broadband for your business or even home.
Note: I am on 900UL+ plan (256 kbps unlimited upload / download) from BSNL.
Note 2: This is not my only broadband plan (obviously). I also have 1 Mbps unlimited connectivity from Tata Indicom. I use load balancing with failover over both of these connections to get reliable bandwidth. It costs me around 130$ monthly.
PS. I would be happy to send the raw ping data to anyone interested so you can do further analysis like average duration of service availability etc.
