On Thursday 08 December 2005 17:23, Saswata Banerjee & Associates wrote:
If you need the extra facilities you need to pay for them. We have negotiated deals with ISPs for our clients at their offices. We had Exatt with whom we were unhappy, spoke to PaceNet and finally took the service from Vibes Online. 256kbps guarenteed 1:1 through put with 98% uptime supported with SLA having penalty clause of 2 times the value of down time. They have given us static IP and every thing we asked for. Ofcourse, we paid far more than what the home user will pay, but that is because the business requirement demanded it.
Stating the obvious.
Finally, the ISP has to make money. They cant do that if they provide all services at Rs. 500 per month. They have to make money in some way. Either they will do that by charging you for MB downloaded, or restricting your facilities or charge you a fair rate. Bandwidth rates in India are still high (thanks to Tatas owned VSNL) and limited Last Mile connectivity (mostly owned by MTNL who refuses to share or new fiber wires which are costly due to lower usage volumes and because they are new). Add to this the stupid restrictions that the local municipalty puts to stop new fiber being laid down, the final result is that the ISP will need to charge you much more than you would like to pay for.
ISPs are charging what they like. Do you really think we lack capacity or the costs for the ISPs are so high that they really cant afford? Let me give you the example of the oh-so-great-MTNL-DSL. Initally, they started with a Rs.399 plan for 400MB @ 256Kbps. Now they offer the same plan for Rs.199 _and_ they have doubled capacities across all plans. Hmm...if the ISP could afford to cut the cost by 50% AND increase their free MBs by 2x then they have effectively quadrupled the benefit to the consumer. So do you think they are now making loss? No. They are far from making losses. They are making huge profits because in the international market ISPs don't charge by the volume, but rather the capacity. They give a damn if you connect your fibre @ 100Mbps and it transfers only 1GB a month. But they will charge you significantly higher if you connect to their network @ 1Gbps.
TATAs and Reliance are sitting on hordes of bandwidth. I also dont like hearing the oh-poor-indians-with-no-submarine-cables nonsense. TYCO deal left TATAs with 11000Gbps (11 Terabits per second) of unlit fiber capacity. They should be giving us a broadband connection for dirt cheap prices. But no. They want to rip off the Indian consumer just like the mobile companies about 5-10 years ago did. Reliance touts its huge fiber all over the country but its not put to good use. Don't get me talking on reliance. This demerger issue has made RIL so incompetitive lately...
Everything finally follows the market. Most users only want the basics of being able to surf the net and get email. So they are happy to pay a lower price for even lower facilities. The ISP will provide a better package if you are willing to pay more.
Haha. Yes, I agree. But its not that way. I am willing to pay for a 10Mbps unlimited connection without any port caps or download caps with a static public IP and a 5:1 ratio (ideally i would want a 1:1 ratio). Is there any ISP who will give me a connection? NO. Why? Because India still isn't a "consumer" oriented market. The consumer is still treated like shit. The competition is too little and ineffective. Couple this with our great Central govt's policies to protect its "Navratna" companies (BSNL / MTNL) and we have one heck of a ****** democracy! The government _has_ to open up the local loop to competition OR the private players must adopt WiMax. Thats the only solution cuz digging roads are and will be hindered by government / bmc. So we wont be like the Koreas or Japan where every house hold is connected through OFCs @ 10/100Mbps
This country has gone to the dogs! I pity the dogs though, they are more faithful than our politicians.