Author Archives: Kunal

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!

One more down, two thousand seven hundred and fifty-five to go – from my “gadgets wishlist”.

My RCO (residence-cum-office) is now a wire free Internet zone. I am typing this sitting in the house across the street, still accessing my home Internet connection wire free. No no, I’m not trying to impress you. Infact this is so lame and common now that if you’re impressed hearing this, you really need to spend more time getting to know what technology can do these days.

Anyways, I was building up towards the news that I have the Netgear WGR614 up and running. Setting it up wasn’t much of a task once I remembered that I would have to attach the router to my computer the first time via the included Ethernet cable. Though, the included CD did not have a Mac OS configuration utility, the web interface worked just fine for me when I connected my PowerBook to the router. Infact I liked the various advanced options that the interface provided, allowing me to specify exactly the kind of connection and security settings I wanted. I’m not sure how the not-so-technically-inclined Mac OS (or even Windows) users would do if the “auto-detect wizard” failed to detect the network settings properly, which is exactly how it behaved in my case.

Tips:
Before installation:
Enable DHCP on the machine you connect to the router via the Ethernet cable, allowing it to be assigned a IP (192.168.1.2 in most cases). You can then use the software (windows only) or the web interface (http://192.168.1.1 username: admin password: password) to configure the router.

After installation:
Disable SSID broadcast if you don’t want your neighbours (or anyone else around) to detect the presence of your WiFi network. Enable WEP as well (password authentication for your network, simply put) – both of these things might decrease the usability of your network a little bit, but go some way in securing it from unauthorized (or unwanted) access.

PS – Okay, only fair you know, I am not really across the street – I’m only 30 feet away (from the router) infact. But, hey, I could have been (across the street i.e.) !!!