Again unrelated to Indian broadband, but I just thought I’d share this with you.

Apple today announced the launch of the 3G iPhone, officially launching on July 11. They’ve also reduced the price of the phone to $199 and $299 for the 8GB and 16GB model respectively. This is, in my opinion, a great price for such a great product.


If you didn’t catch the info in the local newspaper, the iPhone is launching in Indian around Diwali.
I wonder at what price Apple will launch the iPhone here. I certainly hope its less than the current grey market price (last I checked, it was 13,000 bucks in Delhi). But hey, you can always buy a cheap Chinese imitation for less

Btw, here are the links to the New York Times story, and the official Apple.com announcement.

I also wonder about the viability of the 3G iPhone with the increasing propagation of WiMax…hmm..another battle on the cards?

Today, I’m posting some non internet related stuff.

Its not much anyways, just a very interesting Flickr photo album from one of my friends, Raj.

Here’s the link to Raj’s Flickr Album

I personally think its one of the funniest albums I’ve seen around. If you’re an Indian, you’ll definitely love it.

P.S.: The “LundUp Laundry Services” picture is my favorite..

Alexa is one of the top resources on the internet for finding out a site’s traffic ranks across the globe. Alexa has been around for years now and is usually a very good barometer of a site’s popularity.

Alexa not only ranks the global 500 (which is topped by Yahoo.com, by the way), but also provides rankings by country.


While looking up the Indian Alexa Top 100, I had some interesting insights:

1. Rediff is India’s largest portal. Though Yahoo does have a higher Alexa rank, it is still not Indian. MSN, IndiaTimes and Sify come in at 2nd, 3rd and 4th place respectively in portal rankings.

2. We Indians love to upload files online: RapidShare.com enjoys 7th position in the Indian top 100, ahead of FaceBook. Perhaps the proliferation of some “other” kind of sites is the reason for this. After all, why would you need to upload files to a random web server?

3. Porn Rules. If anyone need any reason to know why we have the world’s highest population, he needs to just look at the most popular sites on the Indian Alexa 100. Starting from Xboard.us (16th), DebonairBlog.com (18th), AdultFriendFinder.com (not exactly pron though - 28th), IndianSexStories.net (56th), FreeSexyIndians.com (74th), to SavitaBhabhi.com (84th), we Indians are clearly a sex-mad lot.

4. Piracy is rampant, still: MiniNova.org (31st), TorrentZ.com (37th), ThePirateBay.org (60th), and ISOHunt.com (66th) are some of the top warez/torrents sites in the Indian top 100.

5. Matrimonial sites are still big money: Led by Shaadi.com (72nd), BharatMatrimony.com (82nd), and JeevanSathi.com (83rd), matrimonial sites are some of the biggest ones in the Indian web space. No other country has so many (if any at all) matrimonial sites in the its top 100. Makes you wonder if we really are shedding the “arranged marriage” tag.

6. The last interesting observation: MySpace.com (93rd) has failed to click off in India. Blame it on the cluttered interface or the poor design, MySpace is one of the top sites on the internet, competing heavily with Facebook for the top social networking spot. While FaceBook.com maintains a healthy traffic rank in India (14th - and climbing), MySpace languishes at the bottom of the rankings table.

For those of you who want to check out the list yourself, here’s the link to the Alexa Top 100 Indian Sites

I’ve been using BSNL broadband for quite a while now. Initially, it was simply because of a lack of available competition; BSNL was the first one to offer cheap broadband. And besides, there were complicated requirements (phone, direct line, etc.), and I already had a BSNL landline (who doesn’t?) which made it much easier for me to get the connection.

The Installation:

My BSNL installation kit came with a modem, some Korean brand named Huawei, a CD with a manual written in Korean (you can expect the BSNL babus to easily forget that), a splitter, and an Ethernet cable.

This was all fine, until I actually started using the service. Download speeds were exceedingly slow, as slow as 2kb/s. I called up the local BSNL technician, and I was told that for the broadband to work effectively, it should have a direct line going into it. My house has a centralized phone line system, meaning a central line supplies the phone connection to all the rooms. So the linesman had to be called, who was neither over friendly, nor over enthusiastic about having to climb atop a 15 foot telephone pole. Finally, a new, direct line was installed, and my BSNL connection started working fine. For the first time in my life, I actually got download speeds over 20kb/s

The Aftermath:

This was all fine too, until I got the phone bill. BSNL has one hell of a rudimentary user control panel, and trying to make heads or tails of it is harder than most would imagine. I had no idea that I had gone over the paltry download limit of 1 GB. Billing at 1 Re/mb, I couldn’t figure what shot up faster: my phone bill, or my blood pressure. So when I was eventually handed the bill for Rs. 6000, surfing porn on the internet did not seem that attractive anymore…BangBros is not that good to spend Rs. 6000 on, is it?

The Conclusion

Here’s my beef with BSNL:
1. They are the only half decent broadband provider in the country, which effectively gives them a monopoly.
2. Customer service to them means installing an automated voice message system, and never actually responding to your problems.
3. They expect all their customers to have network-engineer skills while negotiating their online user panel. I have never seen so many technical terms crammed into such small an area.
4. Download limits. Arrgh!

I could go on and on, from the poor construction quality of their line splitter, to the Korean modem manual, to their requirement for a “direct line”, the friendly neighborhood linesman
Point is, if you can, try and stay away from BSNL. It’ll do you a world of good…

The state of broadband in India is bad at best. Lack of infrastructure, limitations on bandwidth, download limits, low speeds are some of the problems.

Lets look at some of the problems plaguing broadband services in India:

1. Dependence on ADSL:

This, to me, is the no.1 problem for broadband in India. ADSL is much slower than cable, which invariably leads to low speeds and bandwidth problems.

2. Lack of infrastructure:

While ADSL is slow, due to the lack of infrastructure and localized cable providers, the chances of an improvement in broadband services by providing internet vaporizes. Unless a national company such as Reliance is prepared to ink deals with the thousands of cable providers across the country, cable internet is a distant dream.

3. Focus on older techs:

ADSL and cable are both outdated technologies. While much of the world is moving to fiber optics, India is still trying to promote ADSL and cable internet

4. Bandwidth monopoly:

Due to a widespread monopoly in the bandwidth, most companies aren’t able to run at full efficiency. The result: clogged networks, low download speeds, download limits. This greatly hampers the online experience.

These are just a few of the problems plaguing broadband in India. Next week, we’ll look at some of these problems in detail, including overview of the prominent high speed internet providers in India