Dear Reader, I am an avid Internet surfer and my entire life revolves around the Internet since I am closely associated with Internet protocols in my profession. I got a 1 GB plan(Rs.495 per month plus taxes) few months ago. I had some trouble to get it working at first since there was some problem at the exchange end. Other than that initial hiccup, from the moment I got it working till date I have not had a single chance for complaint. In fact I consistently get a throughput of 35 Kilobytes per second(280 kilobits per second), higher than the advertised value of 256 Kilobytes per second! Of course this only depends on the purity of the copper and the quality of the terminations using junction boxes. I know another BSNL user who has got a much lower throughput in the same locality. You can ask BSNL to fix it in case you feel your connection is too slow. I think it will be very difficult for any private party to give the same value for money.This I can say with assurance because other than teenagers who download music and movies, there really cannot be anyone who stresses the broadband connection like me. I have a network of four computers at home and I run different free operating systems like Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD. Some of them I directly installed from the Internet and others, I downloaded the CD images and burnt them at home and installed them. Let us get to some interesting technical details later. But first, for a lay user, I think it is very difficult to match the reliability, performance, throughput, stability and connectivity of BSNL DataOne. I went for a modem purchase plan for Rs.1200. The modem is from Hwawei and I find the name Sterlite on it. The model number is SmartAX MT882. I think DataOne is pretty recent and other than some very old users, nearly everyone should be having the same modem as mine.DataOne is very economical because whatever you download or upload between 2:00 am and 8:00 am is not accounted for in your bill. I have used it to my advantage since UNIX operating systems easily lend to automating downloads without user intervention as long as the machine is switched on and it is connected to the Internet.We will soon see how you can effectively use this 2:00 am to 8:00 am window for downloading CD images and other stuff. The above does not apply anymore since today there is an infinite download option available at just Rs.900/- per month.
But first some tips coming from experience. I never switch off the modem. My computers and modem are ON round the clock. The modem comes bundled with a full fledged computer inside it capable of talking very many useful network protocols. I didn’t have to configure anything manually. But you may want to enable the webserver on it. It is very simple to do. You can get several statistics and manipulate information using the web interface. First from your command prompt in your Windows or Linux box, enter the commandcmd> telnet 192.168.1.1It will prompt for a username and password. Give ’’admin’’ as the username and ’’admin’’ as the password. You will be logged in. Then just type> webserver enableAnd you are set. Now you can access the modem’s webserver from IE or Firefox browser by typing https://192.168.1.1Login and explore. If you want to do webhosting from your paltry 64 kbps connection(since that is the uplink bandwidth you have), you can do it with the modem’s web interface. Go to the ’’virtual server’’ menu and do a port forwarding of port 80 to your private IP address’s webserver port(80). Another thing to note is that other than bandwidth, what makes DataOne truly rock is the sheer quality of the modem. In fact, it is not just a modem, it is also a modem because it is much more than that. The SmartAX MT882 device is capable of the following:-1) DHCP server to auto configure computers to access the Internet2) PPPoE is built in (modem does this for you instead of you running it on your computer)3) Firewall4) NAT or network address translation again for seamless access to Internet5) DNS6) SNTP for time synchronization7) Few routing protocols like RIP ( I have not explored it)As you can see, it is truly power packed and all of these protocols play together to give you seamless connectivity and auto configuration. Little bit about the strobes or LEDs on the modem. There are five of them.1) Power2) Link3) Activity4) LAN5) USBTo figure out whether your Internet connection is working properly, you should verify that the second (Link) and the fourth(LAN) LEDs are glowing with an amber(orange) color. And of course the power LED will be green. If you are sending or receiving data, you will see the Activity(third) LED blinking. During connectivity lapses ( which are very rare indeed), you will the see the Link LED turn green. You should wait for it to turn amber to get connected. In fact in my heavy usage of several months, I have had to reboot the modem only four or five times. All other times, whenever there is a lapse the modem detects it and reconnects automatically. Kudos to the software running on the modem!In fact the modem also supports a soft reset option in which you can reboot the modem using the telnet command I mentioned above. First connect, login and then type > system restartin case you have connectivity problem and the modem will reboot automatically.A small note on how to schedule CD image downloads at night 2:00 am in UNIX operating systems. You have to use the ’’at’’ command which seems to be the simplest and best way to achieve this goal.And you have to use a command line download tool like wget. For instance if you want to download cd.iso from https://cdimages.com(a fictitious site), then all you have to do is type this at your linux terminal, $ echo ’’wget https://cdimages.com/cd.iso’’ | at 02:00And you are set. In case you want to give elaborate commands, then you can write a small shell script to do it for you. If you want the download to stop at 08:00 and resume next day 02:00 am until the download is complete, this can also be done. You can mail me(girish1729@yahoo.com) in case you need help for developing a program for that. I use my computer (and Internet ) for the following.1) Listening to music( mp3, ogg, avi, wma etc... formats) after ripping CDs if necessary2) Watching television using a TV card( I recommend Techcom card only Rs.1200 or so)3) Listening to FM radio using the same TV card4) Watching movies of course from CD and DVD5) Talking to my friends around the world using voipbuster VoIP software( http://www.voipbuster.com) and skype6) Because of 6) I can use my Internet and computer as a phone to call any developed nation for free or very little charge whereas people from other countries to talk to India have to spend more than us. :-)7) And everything else the computer can do One thing to remember is that the upstream bandwidth is only 64 kilobits per second and this may affect VoIP and while sending large mails. All ADSL technologies offer very low upstream bandwidth compared to downstream bandwidth.You can use the bing tool to figure out how much bandwidth you are getting. From linux root prompt, type# bing 192.168.1.1 https://dataone.inLet me end the review with the sentence, BSNL DataOne has truly opened a new world of opportunity for me