May 24, 2001 08:46 PM
13276 Views
All those who have VSNL ISP all well aware about the problems associated with it, slow connection, not getting connected at all etc. (although this has reduced a lot NOW). Because of unreliable VSNL connection I decided to keep another ISP preferably a free ISP as a fall back.
When I started looking for a free Internet provider, I came across two ISP’s namely Caltiger and Cheecoo. I downloaded both. However I have never been able to connect to the net using Cheecoo; not even a single time.
I got to admit that I have a soft spot for Caltiger. That is because when my computer was new, I had borrowed some floppies from my friends. One of the floppy had a virus and my Norton Antivirus did not detect it since the virus definitions were not up to date. I did not have an Internet connection then. I just did not know what to do. Then one friend of mine gave me his Caltiger account username and password. I logged on to the net using his account and updated my virus definitions. If it hadn’t been for Caltiger the virus could have done lot more damage than it actually did!
Because it was a free ISP my friend did not hesitate to give his password and nor did I feel guilty of using my friends account. (I hope everybody gets what I mean to say.)
Very recently when there was some infrastructure problem with VSNL connection, I used to connect to the net using my Caltiger connection.
About Caltiger: As mentioned above, Caltiger is absolutely free of cost. You just have to download the dialer, which is about 1.2 MB from the site https://caltiger.com. Very recently they updated their dialer to version3.
Advertisements: As Caltiger is a free ISP you just have to bear their advertisements. In version2 of Caltiger dialer there was a big advertisement bar, which was fixed to the top of the screen and made the windows smaller. This feature has been changed in version3. First of all, the advertisement bar has become smaller and secondly it can be kept anywhere on the screen i.e. it is not fixed and does not reduce the size of the window.
I personally have no disliking for this advertisement bar, as I feel that this is the means of earning for the employees of Caltiger. I consider it to be a part of the ISP, after all if there were no advertisers we wouldn’t have enjoyed free service!!
Speed: Whenever I log on to the net I generally just have to do 3 things: check my mail, download some file or program and visit mouthshut.com. Now the technology used by mouthshut is such that it loads very fast even in Caltiger connection!! The other two things are… well, slow but still not slow as version2. The very first day I used the version3 of Caltiger, for the first time ever I got a downloading speed of 1.5 kb/sec.
Mail: Caltiger even provides its users with a POP mail which I however I have never used. I generally give my Caltiger email address at site from which I don’t intend receiving any mails.
Drawbacks: You cannot connect to the net using Caltiger at peak hours. Even if you get connected the sites take such a lot of time to load that it is equivalent to not getting connected at all. You just would be unnecessary increasing your telephone bills. But I guess you cannot expect too much from a free ISP.
Many people must have downloaded the version3 and found the file to be corrupt. I faced this problem. Later on I received a mail from Caltiger in which they said that they had improved the version3. They even claimed that they had increased their bandwidth.
