From January 1 2007 onwards, BSNL is giving you the speed of 2mbps for every home & business customer except those who are using UL (unlimited) packages. Now you may not know, this service upgrade will cost you more money than you expected.

When BSNL launched their services years ago, the packages were based on the speed and usage limitation. For home plans, they were starting at 256kbps and ending at 1mbps. By this service upgrade, BSNL will allow you to surf at speeds of 2mbs wherever it is possible. This means the old 256kps people can now surf at 2mbs. The other difference is that usage limit has been increased to higher levels.

The changes are as follows

Home Starter :
400MB -> 1GB
Home 500
1GB -> 2.5GB
Home 1000
2.5GB -> 5GB
Home 1800
5GB -> 10 GB
Home 3300
10GB -> 20GB

Now with massive speed, here is scenario,

For 2mbps connection, the average download rate will be

2048/8 = 256KB/s.

As usual you won’t get this much with BSNL broadband. Thus approximating it to around 240KB/s, you need only 73 minutes to use the full 1GB. Which is approximately equal to 1hr & 15 minutes. Thus if you start checking YouTube like sites or the sites with large images, you can easily use more that this bandwidth in matter of hours. At end of the day you will be paying extra for the additional usage.

The people who will be hugely affected are Internet cafes. Most of the cafes’ don’t have bandwidth control and customers can easily exploit this situation. With the help of a USB stick, they can easily download GBs of data in matter of hours. If you are smart you can download DVDs at as low as Rs.50 or so. (approximately 3-4hrs of cafe usage)

The maximum allocated usage is 75 GB for the biggest business plan. Smaller browsing centres will be using packages of 20Gb limit. And I believe this can be used up in matter of days. Then these people need to pay extra for the additional usage.

The point I’m making is that, high bandwidth does not help you. It is only helping BSNL. This is a trap by BSNL, they know Indians are addicted to Internet and if they give you more speed, you will definitely use more and pay more.

Honestly, I think the only way you can enjoy the freedom of web is by downgrading to UL plans.


Related Entries: