BSNL marked the year 2007 as the ‘Year of broadband’. Good for us!
They have made a slew of changes to be implemented from the New Year day itself including giving speeds upto 2 mbps! These type of speeds were never heard of before in India. Other ISPs haven’t announced their plans but it should be good news for the customers who were fooled all this time. I’m looking for free Wi-Fi network in major cities across India, like what Singapore did.
I made it a point not to curse BSNL after they announced unlimited plans earlier this year. But still these sarkari logs take time to announce the plans and things officially.
Highlights of the ‘bonanza’
Here are the highlights of things that we can expect from next year:
1. All the existing customers irrespective of the plan will be upgraded to 2 mbps from next year free of cost. This of course depends on the technical feasibility.
2. The downloading limits in Home 250 and Business 700 plans have been enhanced to 1 GB and 4 GB from 400 MB and 2 GB, respectively.
3. The rates after we cross the threshold of the limit will be reduced to Rs 0.90 from Rs 1.20 for the Home 250 plan. The rates will be slashed for other plans as well.
4. The rental of the ADSL modems will also be reduced to Rs 60 from Rs 100.
5. BSNL will soon provide online gaming service as well. Comes in Standard and Premium packages — with monthly fixed charges of Rs 100 and Rs 200, respectively.
6. BSNL is already in the process of launching triple play services (what is this?) over broadband in Pune and subsequently in Chennai and Bangalore.
7. BSNL would extend Dataone service from 600 towns to 1,000, besides giving 50 lakh additional connections.
Source and more read: BSNL’s bonanza @ The Hindu.
So what’s the deal?
Theoretically we can leech around 21 GB (2048kb x 60 x 60 x 24) in a day. My HDD size is not even 20 GB!
In our office we have a 2 mbps connection. I think practically it’s not possible to leech 21 GB or so in 24 hrs. Here I can leech a 650-700mb in an hour or so. So maybe it’s safe to say that we can leech 15-18 GB in a day excluding the uploads. So on paper, we should get 256 KBps… I have never seen utorrent crossing over 235-240 KBps. Being an ADSL line I dont think we can get more than 30-45 KBps for uploads. We have only 56 Kbps upload line for the 256 kbps connections.
Also remember that the speed depends on various factors. You can’t get 240KBps every time you have something to leech. Even if you have a 256k line, the speeds on public tracker torrents was slow. You need peers who can give you 240 KBps+ speeds and servers should also have that kind of bandwidth for http downloads. Maybe you have to add more than one file to download at anytime to utilize your full bandwidth.
If only I was in Chennai, I would have sucked BSNL dry. Even with my 256k line I used to leech over 62 GB (excluding uploads) in a month.
Enjoy guys..I miss Chennai even more now!
[Edit] - 27/12/2006
Here’s the new plan to be effect from Jan 1, 2007: New Tarrif.
