BSNL – The worst ISP in India

The most popular ISP in India has to be BSNL. Its cheap and affordable for many, thanks to a few very good plans it has for broadband. But here is my review of BSNL after using it for a few years – ITS HORRIBLE.

BSNL promised to deliver cheap 2.0Mbps broadband to every house in India. But that is hardly broadband anymore. Its more like online torture for its customers. Personally speaking, I use BSNL H500, a Rs. 500 plan which, if not for BSNL’s shitty nature, would have been actually GOOD by Indian pricing standards. It has a monthly data cap of 2.5GB, with happy hours from 2:00 AM to 8:00 AM when there is no data cap. During non happy hours, it bills Re. 0.90 for every MB which exceeds the 2.5GB cap. But yeah, its still horrible, and yet I am forced to use it. Why ? Read on…

2Mbps is not really 2Mbps

BSNL claims it offers 2Mbps internet, but its never really 2Mbps (or 256KBps). Most of the time, speed is around 200KBps, and during the happy hours, the speed per connection is often throttled, to very low speeds. This is clearly a cheap stratagy to decieve and cheat people, since it officially states that it offers “upto” 2Mbps connection speeds. Legally speaking, its not doing any wrong, but this twisting of language does decieve many people. Under normal circumstances, “upto” can be refered to being somewhere “around” 2Mbps. But as far as BSNL is concerned, its not true at all.

The customer care service personal with questionable knowledge level BSNL employs only make things worse by confusing people. Many of them think “browsing” speed is different from “download” speed, and say that the 2Mbps refers to the “browsing” speed. Despite several attempts to explain them about browsing being the same as downloading html files and then opening them, they are determined to believe that browsing is different from downloading. A few cite customer reviews stating that they get 100mbps connection, and claim that its much higher than 2Mbps and that its the system thats at fault.(note: most lan cards in PCs have a max connection speed of 100mbps which is cited by windows as 100mbps connection speed in connection properties, fooling novice customers.)

Broadband means “ALWAYS ON”, right ? Well, with BSNL, it DOES NOT.

OK, let me set speed throttling aside, next comes the reason BSNL Broadband is so horrible when it comes to downloads from connections which don’t allow resume. I am refering to several FTP sites and many file sharing websites. The internet keeps reconnecting. Reconnecting again and again, without warning, for apparently no reason at all. I remember, the last time I bothered to count, I noticed that while I waited for a rapidshare.com timer to count down from 100 to 0 seconds, the internet reconnected approximately 8 times in 4 minutes. Its impossible to use BSNL broadband with filesharing websites like rapidshare, and several popular mirror sites for gnu/linux distros.

Can I atleast browse normally, despite reconnections ? NO again.

Then comes the famous BSNL down times. Often, the network cannot be accessed because of downtimes at BSNL. They appear to turn off the network every week for several hours, and in extreme cases, I have gone days without networking. This with all my life being online. Wait there is more – these downtimes often occur in happy hours, the hours when we download the most.

2Mbps ? Wow!!! Compared to the older service of 256Kbps, my pings are low, aren’t they ? NO AGAIN.

The download speed may go upto 2Mbps, but pings are still very high. This is the reason I am hardly able to game, and its also the reason several people still prefer a local ISP’s limited 256Kbps connection for gaming to BSNL’s service. My friend with 256Kbps gets a ping of 100 while with BSNL 2Mbps I get 200-300 pings. This ping again fluctuates, with me getting 100 ping once in a blue moon and sometimes the ping going upto 800, all on the same server, while my friend happily games on with his 100 ping. [note: as I was typing this, I just reconnected...]

Are there any other crazy BSNL issues ?

Well, I can’t remember any more related to MY internet, however, BSNL has some crazier internet plans. For Rs. 150 per month, they advertise one of their plans as India’s cheapest 2mbps broadband. But guess what ? It has a data cap of 150MB, and it costs you an additional rupee per extra mb downloaded. Wow BSNL, thats like 20 whole minutes of downloading. Great. Just great. All hail BSNL, the lord of cheapness.

Edit: And yeah, BSNL is known for their riddiculous SMS service for their mobile phone schemes. SMSes sent through them take several hours to reach someone. Its next to only snail mail.

Then why the hell do I STILL use it ?

Unfortunately, I couldn’t find any other ISP with a plan of this type thats priced the same or below. Due to a small wallet crunch, I am stuck with BSNL, atleast for the next several months. While there do exist some rather highly attractive (relative to BSNL plans) plans in the 265Kbps unlimited segment, I need 2Mbps, and hence, I am still with BSNL.

PLEASE CLICK ME TO DIGG THIS

edit: When B is capitalised in kBps it means kilo BYTES, and when B is not capitalised in kbps it means kilo BITS. 8 bits make 1 byte. Thanks to http://www.dslreports.com/faq/2388 for explaining the convention clearly, and thanks to Cr0nor for pointing out my mistake.