Only game in town. Review on Dishnet DSL

While primarily resident in the USA, I have over the last few years come to spend significant time in the technological backwater of Calcutta/Kolkata where most people still use the rotary phone. My family had various dialup accounts with the usual suspects like VSNL, Satyam etc. While in some locations in the city dialups work rather well, it was an unmitigated disaster where I live, in Salt Lake. The line was extremely noisy, and reading email was only possible late at night and that too with extreme patience. The world wide wait felt like a life sentence.

Suffice to say, there was no guarantee of a good night's rest if you had an important email that had to be read. Last year I stumbled across some information regarding the new DIAS service from BSNL. It felt too good to be true, so on my next visit home I trudged across to the local telephone office in a rickshaw to submit my application. It is enough to say that I had to visit the office 5 times before the right person was available at the right time to receive my application.

I then waited for my number to come up for installation, frequently visiting and calling them in the meantime to intimate a sense of urgency. After a month and a half, when things were still not too hopeful of a connection in the immediate future ( they said they had no free ports ! ), I gave up and started thinking of using a cell phone from Reliance for data connectivity. Visiting a local Reliance dealer, I was discussing these things when he told me about Dishnet DSL. I was surprised since I had found no information about their activities in Kolkata in spite of extensive research in the past. Seeing a ray of light in the darkness, I called up the number he gave me.

That same afternoon, two energetic young fellows arrived at my house and we discussed and decided on a plan. It was to be a 256 / 128 Kbps connection with a data cap of 0.3 GB for a price of Rs 900 pm plus a one time installation charge of Rs 8000. Every additional 10MB of data would cost Rs 15. I did a rapid calculation in my mind and liked the conclusions I reached. I paid them the installation charge and asked them to hook me up pronto! Within a week they pulled the cable from their local hub and I was up and surfing at rates between 128K to 512K depending on the time of day.

Since I did most of my work at night, when I got 512K quite consistently, I felt I was back in the USA. Now for some details. Being a power user, and the father of a power user ( my son downloads games quite frequently ), I end of utilizing anywhere between 2 - 3 GB a month, for which I pay between Rs 2000 to Rs 3500. But for most normal users, the amount will not far exceed Rs 1000. Of course, the telephone bills have significantly reduced to offset these costs to a degree, but the real positive is the vastly enabling experience DSL provides as contrasted with the crippling, suicide inducing dialup experience. The customer service of course is not up to the mark.

Firstly, there is no service on weekends and after 5PM. So if your line goes down then, you are screwed. Secondly, of late the customer service line is virtually unreachable, and they have provided a voicemail line where one can leave one's complaint. On the plus side, except for a couple of occasions in 6 months, the line doesnt go down for longer than a few hours. Sometimes, a power cycle of the machine clears the problem. Recently there have been more frequent disruptions of short durations, and it is apparently due to the merger with VSNL.

The last few days I have had a perfectly stable connection, so maybe they have sorted that out. Billing is quite good, they send a person to my house to collect the check and are very lenient with delays in payment. They also provide a backup dialup number for use when the DSL is down. The only quibble I have apart from the non availability of customer service during non-office hours is that they force you to take a USB modem by pricing the ethernet modem packages way too high.

This forces me to tie up a computer as the internet gateway rather than hook the incoming line directly to my wireless router. Since the gateway computer runs Windows, that is the source of additional problems on an intermittent basis. I dont think they have Linux drivers for their modems.

So in the end, I now no longer feel crippled when I am in Kolkata. I thank Dishnet DSL for this as much as anything else, and am willing to forgive them their glitches on the condition that they make an honest effort to improve the quality of their offerings with time.