Broadband saga. Review on Hathway Broadband

What started of as an American Defense project to interlink multiple Computers together for better communication and productivity is now the most famous and widely used phenomenon in the world. Yes, it is The Internet.

Another person who deserves special mention is the revered Tim Berners-Lee whose ingenious mind invented the ubiquitous WWW, the World Wide Web.

You have your trusted PC, your trusted telephone line. So what else do you need to invade the world of https:// An Internet Service Provider (ISP) ofcourse. After using multiple dialup ISP's with experiences ranging from downright disgust (Dishnet ETH) to fairly reliable (VSNL) I was itching to experience the power of broadband. Prices were too high, the modems costed a further ski high and the services were nothing to boast about. But the snail speed of the dialup service, connection drops (as frequent as droppings from sky) and the incessant need for redialing had me wanting for more.

Hathway Internet services advertising finally caught my eye. The deal was made as follows...

1) The Package: 256MB Silver Plan.

2) The Price: Rs. 750 per month including a ridiculously high service tax of 10.2% (courtesy, the Govt. of India)

3) A download limit of 500MB per month (whoopie...)

4) Modem free to use (albeit a refundable deposit of Rs. 1K) (more whoopie

& yee-haw)

5) Rs. 1K of initial blah blah charges

6) Additional charge of Rs. 2 per MB of data downloaded, in excess of

500MB.

7). 1 Email ID with a quota of 5MB.

Before proceeding further, let us delve into a small amount of technical

details.

Rambling begins

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Hathway provides Internet services over Cable. This is the same cable which brings into your home those unlimited channels on TV. The mystery property of this cable is that it can carry signals of both TV channels and Internet services. Both the signals do not clash with each other, as they travel under different frequencies or bandwidth. This is the reason that makes this a very viable option for the service

provider. See, one cable two services :-). And there's more to

cheer. While dialup gives only 56Kbps (kilo-bits-per-second) of bandwidth

(means, at a time only 56Kbps of data can travel over the telephone line), the cable has a whooping 27Mbps of bandwidth. This bandwidth is shared among all the customers in that particular area who have the service from the same provider.

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Rambling ends

A call to Hathway and they sent one of their sales guys to my home. (That was quick you know). Guptaji (arre...he's the sales guy) imparted me all the virtues of Hathway. Sir, we are ISO 9001 customer care centre. Sir, we pick up the calls within 5 rings. Sir, somebody will definitely attend your complaint within 24hrs of you logging it. Wah! I was impressed. I donated him the cheque worth Rs. 2750. 2 days later, a couple of technicians pulled up the cable to my home, connected my modem to my PC and hey I was online on broadband. Waat a great day in my life.

Rambling 2

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Some of the things you need for a cable broadband connection are...

1). Your PC, ofcourse.

2). A Network Card aka NIC. The most common & reliable is the DLink Card for Rs. 500

3). A Cable Modem. Very similar to your dialup modem. Instead of a

telephone line, you plugin the cable to this modem. Then you connect the modem to the PC using a network cable. (Tech Term: CAT5 cable).

Cable Modem is the piece of equipment which converts Digital signals to Analog and vice-versa.

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Rambling 2 ends

The initial speeds I obtained were very good. Out of the promised 256Kbps, I

got 200Kbps at almost all times of the day. I must add that I use Leech Get, which is a download manager tool which also boosts the download speeds. Web pages open blazingly fast, faster than a speeding bullet...err..too much bluff ain't good, right. But definitely much much faster than on dialup. Its been 4 months since I got my connection and even today I get a decent speed of 160-180Kbps during any time of the day.

The other important aspect of any service, is the dreaded Customer Service or the Customer Care centre. I'm afraid Hathway scores looow points here. The CC is often manned by folks who have very little technical knowledge. They are often not aware of any serious existing problem. The famous ISO 900x is tossed out of the window here. Yes, the calls are picked up within the first 5 rings, but I have to dial atleast 10 times before I get connected. The breakdowns in the service are frequent, usually to blame is the cable being cut somewhere or a signal problem (fondly known as the RF problem). There is no definite time frame when it gets resolved. But at a low price of 750 per month & a whooping download limit of 500MB I am more

than satisfied for this service.

The web mail interface (one mail ID @hathway.net per connection) is barely sufficient. The mail download feature (a.k.a POP server) often goes kaput. Till date I haven't been able to view the service usage page which shows how many MB of data I've downloaded. I also managed to log a complaint for this on their website, the status of which is still ''Registered''. Fantastic job huh. :-)).

So if your cup of tea includes, long hours of browsing the net, fair amount of downloads and if you can afford the 5-6 breakdowns in a month, then this is the best deal in town. Moreover with the Cable Modem being offered for free, this is an icing on the cake.

On the WWW: https://hathway.com

Bangalore (Phone): 5123 1313