BSNL Facing Heat from Local Players on Wired Broadband Segment

I know many one who have just begun to reading this article start thinking how ridiculous to compare a Govt. owned nationwide ‘most reliable’ ISP with some crappy, buggy, unreliable ISPs that’s too provided and serviced by local cable operators provided. I know it’s a very natural to think so, even personally I also would think so. But after using one of them so called bogus service I was bound to change my thought. And after digging a bit with help of the experiences of many of my friends I have decided to share this with you people. Here this is.

BSNL is a state owned, country’s largest broadband service provider and no doubt in many places it’s the one and only provider of broadband. As expected monopoly is also there. Still BSNL is continuously facing loss making if we consider the conditions in metropolitan area we can see that there are many ISPs. Some of them are provided by your local cable operators and they are performing very well in terms of price, reliability, performance, service and some other issues.

I am going to explain all of these one by one. Before mentioning anything I should clear that the below mentioned data and information’s are based on my personal and some of them are collected from my friends from many parts of Kolkata. So it may vary from area to area, person to person. I just tried to give an outline rather than a direct comparison.

• Price:

Price is one of the main and important issues. Surprisingly BSNL’s ADSL broadband plans are costlier (and BSNL charges skew high price for FTTx/FTTH that no home user can afford them). Even prices are very much outdated (2007’s price still now) where other state owned ISP MTNL is started providing 512 Kbps combo(BB + LL’s rental) at Rs.500, BSNL’s is still charging Rs.750. Same applicable on local cable provided BB’s plans also. Better look on the below table:

* plans are still not updated in website but available through local cable operator.
** all above plans may vary a bit from operator to operator.

In Kolkata there are some other ISP also, like Get Network, though none in my circle is using it, so can’t able to get the details of them. I also did not take inputs from wireless ISPs like Tikona, Meghbela Wireless or A1 Diginet.

One of the main benefits is all these plans are prepaid. So, pay and use. Next month? Need higher speed? Just ask them to recharge your specific pack; speed will be increased in next second after recharge. This is very handy, unlike submission of application form and other bla bla from Govt Babus at BSNL.

One of the other players of Hyderabad’s Beam Fiber is offering more lucrative plans like below:

FUP Limits:

There plenty of local broadband operators in India. They have also above like plans but as I was able to collect data from Kolkata based ISPs, so can’t able to mentions all of them tariff plans.

• Reliability:

The above mentioned ISPs are operating around 5 years (+/-) in Kolkata. As I have seen they never increase plans costs suddenly or frequently. Rather price list is very much stable. It’s also true that some local operators charges few bucks extra (say Rs.50) as service/maintenance fee. But that’s all.

• Performance:

Let’s come to the connectivity issue. First of all I m mentioning a speed test result. I should mention that all the below mentioned test are taken through speedtest.net and via Reliance Communication, Mumbai server.

Look at the ping. Speed will be as per your opted pack. But BSNL’s ping is too high. This high ping may result in surfing and must not appropriate for online gaming and other stuffs.

Again I m telling this results were taken randomly. In your area BSNL may perform well, but it happens somewhere (BSNL result has been taken from Madhyamgram).

• Service and some other issues:

Personally, I am using one of the local broadband for more than 4 months. Its true problem occurs but rectifies in minimum time unlike BSNL. If your local cablewala dada is very much customer friendly, then you should have fewer problems. Your one phone call may solve your entire problem. If you are opting for long-term package, you may get some discounts like BSNL. Peering (will discuss in another article) also a profitable service you may get along with your local ISPs. Meghbela and Alliance provides extraordinary high speed over torrents via peering.

So, at the end of the story I will just these ISPs are giving high competition to BSNL. Not only on metropolitan area, these ISPs also started offering their service on sub-urban areas in many parts. In rural area BSNL is only one to serve but still miles away to touch its expectations. It’s time for BSNL to improve their service, revising their package values and set up faster problem solving infrastructure. Otherwise who can say broadband monopoly is not going to be erased.