Nice title han? It has to be. Scoured around the information super highway for it. “Wingding” means a kind of a noisy, exciting celebration or party. i bet you didn’t know that before now.
Well, narcissism aside, this is the long overdue post that I was supposed to make about my adventures two weekends ago. Twitter makes bloggers lazy. Those of you who follow me ( which is probably only me :P ) might recollect me tweeting the gist of this post. I hear you saying “enough already”. OK, without further yack yacking, here goes…
It was an innocent little, typical laid back weekend and I decided to visit my friend's house to check the speeds of my newly acquired BSNL EV_DO Data card. First, we started off with all the usual yada, yada, yada and then started the speed tests with a known fast and reliable Microsoft server, downloading the Windows live installer (the offline version of approx 118MB). We used Reget as our download manager, our favorite one since the first time we laid our hands on it. And FYI…We're still use the same old version (whichever that is, don’t remember :P ) and never have upgraded. The download started off and hit 50KBps (multiply by 8 to get kbps-kilobits per second) easily. It occasionally touched 100KBps and rarely even touched 150KBps. That was half of the speed that my friend had got when he had tried it earlier with another card.
We thought, may be the room has got something to do with it and started looking at things that might affect the signal reception. First thing we noticed was the Wi-Fi router being ON. We turned it off and… no difference. Then we kept the card closer to the window. And? Still no difference. Then we took out our final weapon – our Dell Inspiron 1535 laptop, plugged in the card and Windows detected it and installed drivers automatically after downloading it from Windows Update. We then took it to the terrace and tried it. Still… No difference.
By this time, it was mid-afternoon and we were undeterred at finding out the reason for slow speeds. Although we knew that it depends on the contention ratio, the time, the day and a whole lot of other factors, we still wanted to find out if the locality mattered. This is when we decided to take a ride with the laptop. With my friend zipping his Kinetic access scooter with me behind holding the laptop, we were drawing some weird stares from people on the road. They must’ve probably be thinking that we’re some crazy idiots showing off our newly bought laptop to the world. Well, all that did not matter. The only thing that mattered was the speed. We went north, we went south, we headed east, then we headed west. The speed averaged 50KBps and at some smaller lanes with concrete jungles, it was worse, it hardly touched 20KBps. This is when I uttered out saying that I wouldn’t move to this locality if ever I were shifting house. A random utterance at that point of time but a significant fact about the changing priorities of a house hunters. Realty agents, watch out. Along with the promise of Bijli, Sadak, Pani and Mosaic the Aam Aadmi now needs broadband internet access too. Wow! what a change in just a decade!
Then finally, we headed a little away towards the New horizon school on 100ft road, Indiranagar and Bam! the speed went straight up above 100KBps and stayed there. We kept moving around the school and the speed did not drop. Owing to the fluctuating nature of the connection, we decided to stop and observe the speed variation for sometime at this place. We thought that we were just lucky and expected it to go down, but on the contrary, it just refused to go below the 100 mark. That’s not the max promised (of 2.4Mbps = 256KBps) but its decent. This is supposed to be used on the go, right? Who on earth would want to download massive files on the go? Armed with this inference after our wacky experiment on the roads of Bangalore, I was relieved to know that my expense on the card was not futile.
Now comes the second part to the story…
The day after I got the data card, my BSNL Broadband DSL connection at home stopped working. Being what it is, I thought this is a typical disconnection that happens occasionally and rectifies itself in a couple of days max, but… I think the people at BSNL thought now that I have the Data card, I don’t deserve the DSL home line and disconnected it permanently. Until this moment, my DSL hasn’t been working. The modem status says “"PPP Down”. The lineman had come to my house to have a look at the settings and spoke to me over the phone saying “What is the problem sir? the DSL link is glowing and working”. I said “I know that I have the DSL Link. I never complained about the link. The modem says PPP down. The call center person said that it is a server side problem and even I think so, so go rectify that”. He said he'll check and rectify. This was on Friday and then came the weekend. Grrr…. Being the bureaucratic bull-sh** that BSNL is, he hadn’t checked anything and is probably enjoying his weekend thinking “I’ll go check if they complain again”. Gauging by his way of talking, I'm sure he knows nothing. As long as there isn’t a problem, it works just great with BSNL, but the moment a problem shows its face, it just refuses to go away until it has boiled all your blood away.
It has started raining now ( one of the advantages of staying in Bangalore), so, I shall stop with this and am going to enjoy my well-earned weekend. Later people.
Showing posts with label BSNL. Show all posts
Showing posts with label BSNL. Show all posts
Sunday, September 6, 2009
Saturday, August 22, 2009
BSNL EV-DO Experience Update
Finally got my connection activated and am using it right now to write this. I must say Murphy's law works flawlessly. "When something can go wrong, it will". I just did my very first speed test on this connection. As expected the ping time was extremely high, but the worse part is that the speed test.net site itself took about five minutes to load. LOL!
My very first EV-DO Speed test result:
![My very first speedtest result](http://www.speedtest.net/result/545345865.png)
Considering that 0.14Mbps =144kbps. I think my card is in the CDMA mode and not the EV-DO mode. Will go through the threads on India Broadband Forum and try to figure out a solution. Too tired to look through it. Will update again tomorrow morning. Watch this space.
My very first EV-DO Speed test result:
![My very first speedtest result](http://www.speedtest.net/result/545345865.png)
Considering that 0.14Mbps =144kbps. I think my card is in the CDMA mode and not the EV-DO mode. Will go through the threads on India Broadband Forum and try to figure out a solution. Too tired to look through it. Will update again tomorrow morning. Watch this space.
Friday, August 21, 2009
BSNL EV-DO Wireless Internet, Yay!
All you poor souls out there on slow internet speeds, welcome your new envy - Me! :evil laughter:
I got myself the BSNL EV-DO 3G CDMA Wireless Internet connection today. Yay!
I never even looked at wireless internet as an option as I had BSNL Broadband at home and at office had Airtel line linking me up to the multi-verse. Well, I call the internet that as it has multiple avatars and serving different sects of people. Religions of sorts, if you know what I mean. There are fan boys of this and that all over the place. Enough of digressing from the topic, back on track...
The reason for me to get this sprang from the fact that I needed it for my work and my company said it'll get me one. They proposed Tata and they have a tie-up with reliance but both didn't offer unlimited plans. I proposed BSNL and for some reason or the other, the idea just got grounded on the run-way, never took off. I waited patiently for a week and then yesterday, I lost my patience. Couldn't resist the temptation. Spoke to a few people. Went online, did some research and was satisfied with the reviews that peopl had posted online about the service. Many thanks to Broadbandforum.in members for clearing a few apprehensions that I had. Buying the modem was a better option as, then, I didn't have to pay the modem rent every month, but then if I don't get the promised level of service, I wouldn't be able to return it. I bugged my friend with my dilemma of whether it was a good idea to get the connection at all in the first place to bother about all this. He said, he required it anyways so if I don't like it or if it did not work in my place as it is supposed to then he'll take it. So, it is win-win all round. Given that backing, I got the application yesterday on the way back home and went back today to submit the required documents.
People had mentioned that I'd have to jump through hoops to get a BSNL connection with all the bureaucracy involved but I must admit that my experience was pure exhiliration. I was amazed at the kind of service that I got from the Customer service centre (CSC). BSNL has evolved a lot from its former form of being the old and dusty Public sector organization. It has metamorphosed itself into a customer centric organization. Although there are a lot of kinks to be ironed out, it is a step in the right direction.
Here are a few shots that I took at office using the Canon digital SLR that was generously offered by my colleague. (Thanks Avinash).
[gallery link="file" orderby="title"]
The experience I had was pure amazement. Now just hoping that the activation will happen withing the promised 24 hours. Watch this space for some speed test results once its active. Post in your experiences with this service if you have/had subscribed to it.
P.S.: I've described my experience at the CSC here: http://broadbandforum.in/bsnl-evdo-broadband/50851-apply-new-bsn-evdo-connection/
I got myself the BSNL EV-DO 3G CDMA Wireless Internet connection today. Yay!
I never even looked at wireless internet as an option as I had BSNL Broadband at home and at office had Airtel line linking me up to the multi-verse. Well, I call the internet that as it has multiple avatars and serving different sects of people. Religions of sorts, if you know what I mean. There are fan boys of this and that all over the place. Enough of digressing from the topic, back on track...
The reason for me to get this sprang from the fact that I needed it for my work and my company said it'll get me one. They proposed Tata and they have a tie-up with reliance but both didn't offer unlimited plans. I proposed BSNL and for some reason or the other, the idea just got grounded on the run-way, never took off. I waited patiently for a week and then yesterday, I lost my patience. Couldn't resist the temptation. Spoke to a few people. Went online, did some research and was satisfied with the reviews that peopl had posted online about the service. Many thanks to Broadbandforum.in members for clearing a few apprehensions that I had. Buying the modem was a better option as, then, I didn't have to pay the modem rent every month, but then if I don't get the promised level of service, I wouldn't be able to return it. I bugged my friend with my dilemma of whether it was a good idea to get the connection at all in the first place to bother about all this. He said, he required it anyways so if I don't like it or if it did not work in my place as it is supposed to then he'll take it. So, it is win-win all round. Given that backing, I got the application yesterday on the way back home and went back today to submit the required documents.
People had mentioned that I'd have to jump through hoops to get a BSNL connection with all the bureaucracy involved but I must admit that my experience was pure exhiliration. I was amazed at the kind of service that I got from the Customer service centre (CSC). BSNL has evolved a lot from its former form of being the old and dusty Public sector organization. It has metamorphosed itself into a customer centric organization. Although there are a lot of kinks to be ironed out, it is a step in the right direction.
Here are a few shots that I took at office using the Canon digital SLR that was generously offered by my colleague. (Thanks Avinash).
[gallery link="file" orderby="title"]
The experience I had was pure amazement. Now just hoping that the activation will happen withing the promised 24 hours. Watch this space for some speed test results once its active. Post in your experiences with this service if you have/had subscribed to it.
P.S.: I've described my experience at the CSC here: http://broadbandforum.in/bsnl-evdo-broadband/50851-apply-new-bsn-evdo-connection/
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