I had been a loyal BSNL customer for its dial-up connection for quite a few years. I felt it had a decent speed even though the customer support left a lot to be desired.
One day my internet hours ran out. It was imperative for me to have a net connection at any cost to do some important work and I had to somehow get a renewal pack. I tried hunting for it in various shops but could not find any. I even went to the BSNL office, but they said it was out of stock and it would take 2 days atleast to procure the packs. Now, that’s a bit expected from Govt. companies, isn’t it?
I had no choice but to go for a Tata Indicom-VSNL connection as an emergency measure since it offered 25 hours as minimum. I would have gone for Sify, but 100 hours were way too much when I knew that in any case I would be going back to BSNL once it became available. I had used VSNL connection 3 years back and it reminded me of those horrendous hours when I had to wait for ages before seeing the page in totality. I thought a collaboration of Tata Indicom and VSNL would make things much faster and 3 years is a long time for a service provider to improve upon his quality of Service. How wrong was I!
When I tried to enter the registration information and click submit button, the page threw some ugly errors. After serveral attempts of re-entering the registration key and filling up the registration information, I finally got through it.
I was totally unimpressed and disgusted with the speed it churned out. I was made to revisit the past ordeal of doing something else as soon as I enter a URL and after 5 minutes checking the browser to see if the page was rendered or not. I expected VSNL’s speed to be modest, but didn’t know that it would be this paltry. It takes hell lot of time to warm up and render any page. I installed their dialer and noticed that its icon in the system tray won’t show the send/receive status, connection time or the kbps information. I wonder if they deliberately did that to mask their sluggish speed so that user won’t be frustrated seeing the low throughput. The download speeds never touched more than 3 kbps.
But not everything was bad. Everytime you connect to the internet, you would be shown your balance for easier tracking. The website for managing one’s account is neatly done. Connections are quite stable with no frequent dropouts. But when you talk about any ISP, it all boils down to the speed it offers, isn’t it? Other enhancements and frills are okay, but what about the performance?
I am afraid, this one sucks bigtime in that department.
Meanwhile, I will have to put up with this torture till the broadband connections get cheaper or the BSNL guys replenish their stock of internet connection packs.