As a resident of M.I.G. Colony, Bandra (East), I came to realize & wish to express one very important thing... One of the biggest things this colony is missing, is the presence of a professional Internet Service Provider... The ISP scene in general, in Mumbai is extremely dismal. With players like Tata Indicom Broadband and Reliance Broadband coming in the market, I expected some increase in the services given by these traditional Cable Operators, but to my surprise, the underworld & cable walla nexus, posts just too much of a strong competition for these big players :-)
For all those who perhaps don't know this, that the Mumbai cable walla's providing the Internet service to you, are nothing but intermediaries and agents for the above mentioned commercial players. Of course, these guys don't really have much command when it comes to commercial connections for big business houses, but for small residents like you and me, the cable walla's are the bhai's!
The whole idea of this post is not only to reflect upon the appalling scene that we are living in, but also, my review on 2 ISP's that I've always been connected to at my residence in Bandra.
From 2002 - 2005, I was connected to the beautiful Internet world via my local cable operator, who was purchasing and distributing bandwidth from Exatt technologies. Now these guys supply bandwidth to a lot of cable operators across Mumbai. I don't know about the ownership of Exatt, but somewhere in May / June 2007, Exatt was taken over by the mighty American giant, AOL. I've heard, the service has improved since then :-). Also, just FYI, the backbone bandwidth carrier for Exatt is Tata Broadband. These guys have a huge backbone infrastructure to carry bandwidth, across Mumbai for these guys...
Coming to my opinion about Exatt... These guys have given me a complete mixed experience. Sometimes, the service is just really great! While sometimes, it is simply depressing. These guys are just not able to define a proper downtime. And rainy season is the most harrowing experience with these guys... I mean, imagine, its raining heavily on a Saturday morning. You can't move out of the house (read, you don't want to move out of the house ;-))... you just want to make yourself a hot cup of coffee and want to surf the internet for technology news and events... you start your PC only to find that the local area network cable is unplugged... In an absolute angry mood, you dial your ISP (read local cable operators) number to abuse him, only to learn that he is such an a*****e that he has kept the receiver aside to avoid calls... This is such a common technique used by these guys :-)
Next, for almost about 1 year, I used the services of Sify Broadband. Sify scared of the local dada's and bhai's went through a different approach. Instead of competing with them, they joined hands with the local cable operators & started their services. Needless to say, Sify is Terrible too. I don't want to comment much on & about Sify, but yes, it sucks!
Recently, I installed the Reliance Broadnet Service at my place. I pay about INR 1122 per month for a 300 Kbps connection. And let me tell you, the service so far has been excellent. There are no down times (but once, when there were heavy rains). The support is just about OK. Sometimes, the support guys fails to understand your query! But the speed has been really good. It is fast, and always manages to deliver a constant speed :-). Also, the -ve about Reliance Broadnet is bill payment. They don't have an online bill payment facility :-(. So if a Reliance drop box is near your house, then you have absolutely no worries!!
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