Selecting broadband services in Mumbai

[pehchan]

I work in US and I have been assigned to work from India for 3 months from my home in Mumbai. In US, I spend around 3 hours everyday on phone and I will be carrying IP phone with me to Mumbai for co-ordinating with US office. I am getting rid of dial-up at my house in Mumbai and installing broadband.

HOWEVER , I am facing the following problems selecting services:

1.) Tata Indicom Broadband ---> Not offered in my area
2.) Sify Broadband ----> They have limitation of 150MB/day or else for the unlimited plan they have limitation of 1 GB per month
3.) MTNL --> Restriction on volume of data (When I connect IP phone and talk for 3 hours each day , I am absolutely bound to use more than 10 GB per month !!)
4.) Reliance BroadNet --> Havent yet inquired abt this option so far.

I want a plan that has unlimited volume of data while time based restrictions are okay with me. I do not want to use my local cable internet as it is known fact that the quality sometimes degrades below dial-up quality.

Anything anyone can suggest? All help is appreciated in advance.

 

[Sushubh]

u have listed the plans available in your area... i doubt anyone here would be able to find the situation in your area out better than you!

 

[dgr81]

mtnl triband has a plan in which u have 1 gb for daytime and night unlimited ...(12 to 8 ) at a speed of 256 kbps ...if u want to use ur ip phone to talk to ppl in the US then the night unlimited wud be the best due to the time difference ....

 

[krish_88]

Go for MTNL Triband

 

[max]

why would your downloads cross 10GB on IP Phones? AFAIK you can set the quality to 16Kbps or 8Kbps and you would get a fairly good quality with little downloads. Besides, if you are going to talk to your US counter parts then you would be using it mostly at night so why not explore the MTNL DSL Night Unlimited plan?

 

[netfreak]

Originally posted by pehchan@Dec 26 2005, 02:29 PM
(When I connect IP phone and talk for 3 hours each day , I am absolutely bound to use more than 10 GB per month !!) [snapback]37214[/snapback]

[/quote]


Some calculations (and my own experience with vonage) on VOIP

Best quality settings use 128 kbps download speed for vonage VOIP phone. And of course you have to purchase it while you are still in US.

128 kbps translates to 16 KBps

Data download in a day (3 hours => 360*60*60 seconds * 16 kbps) would be 172800 KB or 168.75 MB.

If you work for 22 days in a month, you will comsume 3.7 GB.

And remember that 128 kbps is worst case scenerio, with silence suppression actual bandwidth requirement will be less.

I use G.729 codec it requires 32 kbps bandwidth. Quality is comparable to what you will get on Airtel/MTNL landlines.

With that codec, you will consume just 1 GB.

Based on that, DSL 2399 plan of MTNL seems a good fit for you.

It gives you 512 kbps speed with 4 GB download.

And if Airtel is available in your area, then Airtel has a 256 kbps plan with unlimited downloads / hours.

 

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