Looks like real broadband for the common man is about to make an entry into India. The trend so far has been of ISPs selling “always on” connections with speeds as low as 32 kbps in the name of “broadband” and charging anything between a couple of hundreds to 1000 for connections upto 128 kbps. Well, you can laugh because the customers are crying!
All that may change sooner than you think.
“The project, once completed, is expected to give a stiff competition to other broadband service providers, including the BSNL, as the promoters have indicated to charge just Rs 100 a month for a domestic broadband connection.
The project will provide services with a minimum bandwidth of 2 Mbps, which is almost eight times higher, as compared to the bandwidth offered by the BSNL.”
The complete story in Business Standard.
So, basically that’s a 2 Mbps line at Rs 100 (less than 2.5 dollars) per month! Hold your horses – don’t get too excited. That is most likely to be just the rent with little or no downloads part of the package. Your badwidth usage bill is going to be seperate for sure – no details of the “per hour” or “per MB” charge are available as yet.
In the rare (read impossible) case that it’s 100 bucks a month for all-u-can-download over a 2 Mbps line, I am moving back to Hyderabad or any nearby village for that matter – because Andhra Pradesh is the only state getting this as of now!