Well, I made the first post on behalf of my dad. I'm in the US now, yesterday he purchased EVDO card from BSNL's Chiria More office. In fact I forced him to do so! Thought it'd improve the call quality for me. I don't know if its a CDMA/GSM modem, its black, named 'Prithvi', connects to the USB port. It cost him around Rs 1500.
Today when I called him on Skype, I experienced all symptoms of poor call quality, blurry/dark video, chopped sound,
echo, and Skype's warning for slow connection. It is in fact worse than Dataone. On the other end, he could hear/see me perfectly, but that was also true for the broadband. On "Call technical info", it showed that he was receiving 50KB/s but sending only 1-2KB/s, thus the awful call quality on my receiving end. I told him to remove the card and turn on the Dataone's modem, it was like before again, not much better though, but I could at least hear him properly.
Is EVDO upload speed really that bad when running Skype? I feel really sorry and ashamed for wasting his money like this, he never really wanted to go for it. Also he doesn't like the new dialer interface called 'BSNL Internet Connection Manager', which has to be kept running in the background as long as he is connected to the internet.
MORE INFO:
1. My dad's apartment is just under 3 minutes walking distance from ISI.
2. I told him to hang up and go to a speed-test site, which reported 0.3Mbps downlink and 0.1Mbps up.
3. The dialer interface keeps showing high Tx/Rx/... value in Kbps, if only it translated well into reality!
What attenuation in -dbm you'r dad is receiving in the prithvi dialer?? The device is Prithvi EVDO UE100 and it looks something like this
http://img407.imageshack.us/img407/3933/evdojpg.jpg
And yes Upload speed is very less in EVDO.If you use Micromax evdo modem MMX 300C you can get upto 900kbps upload but that also depends. and also for good speeds you have to change the position of the device through external cables because only when all conditions like latitude,longitude and other factors are in position then only you will receive good speed with bsnl evdo otherwise not. Direct connection to PC will not help in case of BSNL.Its amazing that if I keep my chair in front of the computer table evdo speed decreases to 400kbps and when I remove the chair speed increases to 1.5mbps
Hello 1st of all Data card is just Rs1199 only not Rs1500.
Yes the upload speed in evdo is bit less. I strongly fell ur father 1st should have gone for a demo r asked where BST comes.
well 1199 is the data card cost and 350 is the activation charges so practically 1500 bucks. I get upload speeds of 120-160kbps(10-20KB/SEC) indoor.I had tested with a 10m USB cable once and had put it outside the window at that time I was getting Upload speeds of 900kbps above :O The device was not Prithvi, it was Micromax MMX300C CDMA 2000 HSIA modem
🙂 Prithvi devices are cheap make and they dont work properly with extension wires
And lastly for Skype I would suggest neither EVDo or Dataone because Upload speed of both sucks due to infrastructure constraints/limitations of
ADSL and not to mention the bad routes of BSNL NIB for which latency to US servers are very poor.
Better get Cable broadband like Sify,Alliance,Meghbela they provide symmetric Upload speeds
🙂