for me its 1.5GB limit not 2.5GB and i agree its just too low. the night 2-8 free i most often dont used. even when i use its only at 6 in the morning, its tiring to get up so early in the morning.
Agreed. I had often wondered why ISPs bother with this sort of arrangement. It seems to be little more than a lure.
i thought about the Airtel plan- 2Mbps, 15GB limit with no free usage time but the amount Rs1200 is a bit high for that plan.
Airtel does offer pretty good value for money by comparison with the other large ISPs, though I'm not sure that this particular plan is available in the Mumbai circle? I may be wrong here.
this is a great plan, only the pricing remains to be seen. i probably wont need more than 20GB and i need the speed to be at least enough to watch youtube videos without having to wait for them to buffer.
so 2Mbps, 20GB limit with reasonable price would be a nice plan for me.
This kind of application is certainly one of the things that we wish to provide a decent experience on.
What is your idea of a reasonable price for this plan? (just for my reference)
Important for me is a plan which has a guaranteed fixed price with no risk of unexpected overcharges... meaning either a truly unlimited plan or a FUPed plan where the speed reduces after a generous download limit but the service continues and monthly rental remains a fixed amount. this is avoid hassles of billing errors and disputes.
To start off I'd like to see a 2 mbps Unlimited (or 100GB Fair Usage Policy with speed reduced to half is acceptable to me)... for under Rs 3k per month...
I understand. Unfortunately, with more speed comes direct cost, in that for every gigabyte of transfer, on a VSNL standard line, we're looking at Rs 34 or thereabouts, not including our overheads. NIXI is Rs 50. These are things we have to take in to account. So a 2Mbps plan has the capacity to transfer over 500GB in a month - you do the math. This is one of the reasons that we wish to implement (unlike other ISPs) the bandwidth quotas ONLY on international or peering traffic: as mentioned in my previous post.
It is unfortunate that as far as international bandwidth is concerned, there are only 3 main providers competing - compared to over 30 each in the US and UK. This is our struggle, but we're really working on it. If I had $600m handy I'd just build my own cable - not that
Tata, Reliance and Bharti are using theirs even close to capacity!
As also previously mentioned, we are considering the possibility of eliminating the *speed* caps on some plans altogether, so if you buy 100GB of data, you get that much usage as fast as it will go - not just at 2mbits or whatever, so for users like yourself, this may be a more favourable option, and it would be easier to bring the overall price down on a plan like this.
Can you achieve that mgcarley? (or any ISP for that matter dammit!) airtel is already doing 2mbps Unlimited (with Fair Usage Policy for some users) so you can shoot for better...
Airtel also own their international cable. We're not quite there yet, but all going well, I wouldn't rule it out. The question is, though, is Airtels 2Mbits plan any good? Having not experienced it myself, for all I know it could be complete rubbish and you might only get 1mbps - or less. Or it could be completely fine and because they have an STM-64 (nearly 10Gbits) or two, their wholesale price of bandwidth is lower than what mine is - at least to begin with.
As far as I am aware, the 100GB fair usage policy applies to all users who actually hit that limit. I am open to the same sort of thing on some of our lower plans (8Mbits or less). I'm not a fan of over-use charges either, and I loathe the fact that we have to even have bandwidth caps, but alas.
Perhaps what we could do is set the bandwidth quota to be hard: that is, if you buy a plan with 10GB, once you hit like 98% of 10GB, when you browse to a webpage, you get a warning telling you you're about to go over with the option to purchase more data at a set rate, and when you hit 100%, all browsing takes you to such a screen, and all downloads are stopped.
This way, instead of worrying about things when your bill arrives, the situation is thus prevented of customers complaining "oh bugger, I've used 430.2mb more than my allowance, which cost me an extra Rs 258".
(of course you would still offer "free" Unlimited downloads for internal data transfers)
the most brilliant idea (which we've been crying for many years now) is the mirroring of
microsoft/
windows servers and other linux distros and open source software (and whatever else you can manage) so that downloading them is FREE of the data caps!
😀 that would really excite me the most...
Glad to hear it. Looks like something that will definitely be put in to effect from day 1. We may end up having the equivalent of Tucows India or download.com India, and also something like iTunes for "Indian" content - high quality digital versions of Indian
music and movies (which would cost a few rupees, of course, but again, would not affect your quota) - but I think that is a whole different project in itself, and would probably come after launch.
also, getting into a dialog with NIXI to enable better/faster/cheaper peering between operators would make broadband faster and cheaper in general too...
In a continuous dialog with NIXI - they tell me the price is being lowered "soon". But to what and when this will happen they have not revealed to me. I'm also in talks with CDNs around the world, incuding (but not limited to) Akamai, and we have an entire rack reserved for their servers when they're ready to give them to us.
btw, mgcarley, please also post your thoughts and website link on other forums like techenclave.com - i hope admin doesn't mind me mentioning them here
😀
I do also post at the other India Broadband forum (run by the same admin, I think?) and TechArena. And Twitter. I hope to also be giving a talk to ILUG in Mumbai in the not-too-distant, but it's not confirmed yet.
