Rolling Out Broadband Internet, On The Cheap

Mathamota writes "The goverment controlled telephone company in the city of Kolkata (Calcutta), India is providing a Internet access service called DIAS (Direct Internet Access System) which provides 24 hour connection at 128kbps (when the phone is being used, it drops to 64). However, the best part is that the cost of Plan I (which has a data transfer limit of 500 megs) is only Rs 825 ($ 16.50) per month, all inclusive. The technology used in this stuff is quite interesting, and there is a whitepaper available at the site of the company which developed the system." At first glance, it sounds just like plain old ISDN; but after reading the white paper, it's a bit different. Cool idea.

Comments

Looks like a good idea

[override11]

But 128K is still slow, after having a cable modem and unlimited monthly downloads, I cant go back! I mean cmon, 500 meg download limit? I do that in an hour on kazaa lite. :)

Re:Looks like a good idea

[gid]

Not on a 128kbps connection you can't. :)

Re:Looks like a good idea

[Anonymous Coward]

rats, just when you finish using your mod points, a post like this comes along.

If it makes you feel better, that would have been a +1, Funny.

Sorry 'bout that.

Re:Looks like a good idea

[glesga_kiss]

But 128K is still slow

And not broadband, if you consider this topic a few days ago, when it was rulled that a company cannot advertise a 128k capped cable modem as "broadband" in the UK.

Re:Looks like a good idea

[sketerpot]

Speaking as someone who has 128k internet at home, I can say with some authority that while it isn't nearly as fast as I would like it to be (Internet2 would be nice), it is one hell of a lot better than dialup access, even with a 56k "turbo" (as AOL once hilariously put it) modem.

Re:Looks like a good idea

[drunk_as_in_beer]

Yeah, really.. It's a horrible deal. It's even worse when you consider that the average income in India is considerably less than what people make in the U.S. And then $16.50 for 500 megs a month would be a rip off even in the U.S.

Re:Looks like a good idea

[k_stamour]

I have dealt with ISPs in this area for a few years. 128 isn't bad since much of the traffic is going through some far away/busy peering points on questionable backbones. It would not be very useful (unless your traffic was local) to have more than 128 k to leave the region. Their telcos are government owned, and I have ate my headset trying to get them to upgrade or fix packet loss (usually caused by too much traffic anyway). They just don't care, unless the government's attitude has changed recently. We also used to sell that region DVB (one way Internet connection over satellite) so they could actually get more than 128k down link for the whole ISP. Then they would use their "normal" connection for up link. GRE tunnels if they could not get their /24 through. ..ehh....my 2 cents.... Any one looking for DVB engineer? ;)

Re:Looks like a good idea

[Anonymous Coward]

But 128K is still slow, after having a cable modem and unlimited monthly downloads, I cant go back!

You think 128K is a culture shock? Just wait until you move!

Re:Looks like a good idea

[Kingsly]

Considering it costs about US$0.50/ hour on dialup out here(India) ... $16.50 for a 24/7 connection.. is a great deal for people that just want to use it for email and stuff.

Re:Looks like a good idea

[drunk_as_in_beer]

Considering it costs about US$0.50/ hour on dialup out here(India) ... $16.50 for a 24/7 connection.. is a great deal for people that just want to use it for email and stuff.

That's 24/7 connection with a 500 MB limit.

Take your $0.50 dialup, assume that you are getting 5k/sec. It would cost you $13.88 to download 500 MB if you were doing a constant 5k/sec. So yeah, you are right. This flat rate deal is better than dialup for people just doing e-mail, instant messaging, and light web browsing.

Last time I was in India, cable modems seemed to be pretty common. I wonder what they are costing? My cousin did most of his Internet access from cyber cafes, which seemed to be rather inexpensive.

Doing a quick search shows that cable modem access can cost anywhere from 1000 Rs ($20.40) to 4000 Rs ($81.63). That 4000 Rs one, was 2000 Rs ($40.82) a month if you subscribe for 6 months in advance, and that's unlimited 24/7 access but limited to one computer. I would imagine of course this varies depending on the area.

Hmmm.. I would have to say $0.50/hour is a rip off, as is the $16.50 deal. The cable modem prices I looked at are reasonable for the value, but still expensive. I'm sure these prices will go down over the next few years, as there is a huge amount of growth in technology in India.

Re:Looks like a good idea

[Matador]

This is what I was going to say !
128k /= Broadband

Re:Looks like a good idea

[hashinclude]

As someone from India, let me enlighten you a little on the Telecom history down here...

Initially, the Telecom dept. was completely under Govt. control. So was internet and all international links (VSNL). Back in 1995, 33.6kbps access used to cost Rs.15,000 per 500 hrs.

Then, as things started becoming a little more .. arhm .. 'Open', there were alternate telcos, alternate ISPs, and these people had to improve their act. The dialup internet access charges finally settled at Rs. 750 for 100hrs of access.

At Rs. 7.5 per hour, this may seem cheap -- till you realize that the PSTN charges (no, it's not free) are Rs 1.20 for every 6 mins (as of today) -- which comes to 12 bucks an hour .. Add that up, it comes to almost Rs. 20 per hour (~ US$ 0.40) for 56k dialup access.

There are some companies in Pune (where I stay) that give 64k internet access service over a LAN, but thats restricted to some small area of the city. The biggest problem here is not the infrastructure cost -- its the recovery time. CAT 5e cable costs the same as it does in the US, but internet access cannot be given as costly, 'cos people don't have the money. (US$ 50 per month == Rs. 2500, which is quite a lot considering that Joe Average earns ~8K - 10K per month, maybe less). I pay Rs. 1250 per month for this connection (24x7, no download cap, 64k)

Also, keep in mind that even most IT companies here dont have more than a few E1 links (2mbps), some survive on just 512k + 512k (from two providers). The problem is that bandwidth is still very costly.

Now, consider the fact that the Govt-owned (not any more actually) BSNL (www.bsnl.co.in) starts providing this access -- they already have all the infrastructure ready (telephone cables). So they don't have to face any rollout charges. Even capped at 500MB, it is a very good deal. As more people start using the 128k connection, there will be some pressure on companies (mostly BSNL itself) to increase the available bandwidth. This should lead to high bandwidth connections soon enough.

One more point in their favour: They say that only 8 such connections per Mbps will be given, which means that the users get True 128kbps, rather than shared 1.5 Mbps (as is the case with cable/dsl in the US). So, hopefully, they will deploy this successfully.

Re:Looks like a good idea

[Lord Flipper]

Kazaa??? why? I roll over a 24 Gb account at giganews every ten days, USENET...think mega terra flops , long retention, multiple streams, no waiting for Junior to wake up and reboot his Winbloze box so you can get the last segs of whatever.... sheesh, Kazaa, right

It is ISDN

[x0n]

It's Indian-Style Dodgy Networking.

- Oisin

download cap

[pmacwill]

500MB limit?
500MB a day right?

Re:download cap

[brejc8]

Nope its per month.
$16 for 500mb of access is quite poor.

Re:download cap

[itsme1234]

Yes, this is the catch ! You could reach your cap in one day (download + upload) using NORMAL dial-up. However, the unlimited plan is 5500 RS = 106 USD. And remember, 100 USD monthly in India ~ 3-4000 USD monthly in USA.

By the way, this is like "high speed DSL" in Germany (Arcor & Deutsche Telekom). 1500 kbit with 2 G cap !

Re:download cap

[Anonymous Coward]

So much for downloading and Linux ISO images (or any ISO image files for that matter!)

Re:download cap

[Micah]

> And remember, 100 USD monthly in India ~ 3-4000 USD monthly in USA.

On average, maybe, but not for the people who will be buying this.

Re:download cap

[xot]

does PSTN support that kinda speed? and yah 500 megs will e eaten up like *poof* if the speed is true.

Marvellous

[Mike Mentalist]

If previous experience is anything to go by, I can expect to see people trying to host 12 player games of Ghost Recon on Xbox Live on a 64k connection, now...

Re:Marvellous

[Anonymous Coward]

I've seen people buy a hub so they can share their boffo 28.8k connection with the xbox and get on Live.

MS's super-fantastic filtering doesn't keep em all out, I'd imagine they must be living in some country where the ISP isnt reporting to MS which IPs they dish out for dynamic dial-up.

hah!

[syle]

At first glance, it sounds just like plain old ISDN; but after reading the white paper, it's a bit different. Cool idea.

Nice try! But, we know that editors aren't allowed to read the articles they link to. You won't fool us so easily, Hemos...

If that is your real name.

What ifs...

[Vodak]

The expansion of Internet access in anyway way is a good thing, but you must ask what will happen when this government ran internet service provider starts cracking down on it's citizens internet usage habits. Because it's a government ran internet service provider would the government be held accountable for file sharing crap going on?

Re:What ifs...

[Mike Mentalist]

Because it's a government ran internet service provider would the government be held accountable for file sharing crap going on?

I suppose it depends on the copyright laws in India, really.

Re:What ifs...

[grumpygrodyguy]

The expansion of Internet access in any way is a good thing

Yes, it's always a good thing for american workers when 3rd world countries learn how to telecommute.

Re:What ifs...

[Vodak]

The United States government has a way of convincing other nations of the world to follow copyright / patent laws that are similar to it's own. Then again we should be happy the United Nations doesn't have the power it wants otherwise the world would be under a single set of laws.. so with bad comes a bit of good.

Re:What ifs...

[Anime_Fan]

Because it's a government ran internet service provider would the government be held accountable for file sharing crap going on?

And I who thought governments ruled a state...

Aren't states by definition supreme powers, with the power to do anything that pleases them (unless they made an agreement that imposes these rights...). Also, since the government usually controls local law enforcement, could it really be held accountable?

Re:What ifs...

[Anonymous Coward]

it's always a good thing for american workers when 3rd world countries learn how to telecommute.

Typical facist comment.

Re:What ifs...

[spRed]

Yes, it's always a good thing for american workers when 3rd world countries learn how to telecommute.

As an American worker you are garunteed your job for life. It is the government's job to protect you from competition foreign and domestic. Because we all know that moving jobs to the third world where there weren't any before is just exploitation by the capitalist pig dogs.

Is that what you meant, or just what you said?

Re:What ifs...

[Mr. McGibby]

Only in the same way that individuals are free to do whatever they want, with only the consequences of the police taking them to prison.

States, even they claim sovreignty, are actually affected by numerous international agreements. Sure, Iraq *can* do whatever they want. But we saw the results of that didn't we?

Re:What ifs...

[Planesdragon]

Then again we should be happy the United Nations doesn't have the power it wants otherwise the world would be under a single set of laws.. so with bad comes a bit of good.

What, exactly, would be wrong from having a single set of worldwide laws?

A system wherein anyone could impose any law on the whole world is obviously bad--but a single system of worldwide laws sounds like a fine idea.

Re:What ifs...

[Anonymous Coward]

So is "facist" some kind of hybrid cross between fascism and racism?

Re:What ifs...

[Spunk]

(a) A system wherein anyone could impose any law on the whole world is obviously bad

(b) but a single system of worldwide laws sounds like a fine idea.

Ok, how do you get (b) without (a)?

Re:What ifs...

[Planesdragon]

Ok, how do you get (b) without (a)?

You have a single central authority that all worldwide laws pass through. No law should affect a citizen who has not had a representative say in it--that is, there should be a clear line of representation from the person to the people who work on and pass the law, preferably as short as possible.

From our current system, the natural method to a worldwide system of laws would be to have every nation join the UN--either voluntarilly or compulsory--and then have the UN General Assembly be the body that adopts laws to a worldwide status.

Re:What ifs...

[Discordantus]

On the other hand, the US can do "whatever it wants". And we've seen the results of that, too.

The ability of a sovereign nation to do "whatever it wants" is directly proportional to the size of it's arsenal.

Of course, we're really talking economics here, since the RIAA can only really leverage economic weight on India. Unless it can convince the US administration that "those terrorists are pirating songs again"...

Re:What ifs...

[bablooo]

Calcutta Telephones (or Kolkata Telephones) is a part of BSNL (Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited), that was formed when part of the Department of Telephones, Govt of India was corporatized last year.

DIAS is not yet popular but is one of the new initiatives by this corporate entity to fight against the private telephony operators in Calcutta like VSNL (Videsh Sanchar Nigam Limited), earlier Govt company but now owned by the Tatas after privatization. Baby steps in the ultimate aim of being a completely independent private entity. So I don't think such a company will be considered by anyone as being a government entity. Also, people and corporations in India, unlike in US, blame individuals for their acts, not the government. BTW, India has one of the best governance model in the world, only to be let down by nepotism and corruption in all government sectors. However, inspite of that, the fact that India still exists and is successful as a country is because of its liberal and adaptable constitution.

Re:What ifs...

[Mr. McGibby]

The ability of a sovereign nation to do "whatever it wants" is directly proportional to the size of it's arsenal.

Have you got a better idea? Perhaps we should all just "get along"? Humans have used force since, well, forever, to solve disagreements. It's human nature and it isn't going to change anytime soon, no matter how many "peace" advocates try to change it.

I'm just glad that the biggest arsenal is the hands of a country that has some decent amount of human rights and the people are free to disagree with their government. Do you really think that if Iraq had the arsenal that the USA has, that the world would be a happier place?

Subsidies???

[foooo]

How much of this "low cost" is because of subsidies?

I could (but would never) roll out low cost T1s to everyone in the USA for 10 bucks a month... just have the government pick up the tab.

~foooo

Re:Subsidies???

[Moridineas]

I'm sure a huge portion!

Subsidies in India are huge. Farmers for instance can get electricity for practically free (and many rich Delhi people buy homes outside of the city to declare themselves farmers to get cheap electricity). Transportation (good train systems, and cheap buses everywhere) is also very heavily subsidized.

Re:Subsidies???

[BitHive]

Well, if you won't give everyone a T1, can you at least give me one? I'll even triple your asking price!

This is not very Cheap for most Indians

[fozzy(pro)]

The cost of this is not inexpensive if you consider what most indians make at a yearly level. Not to mention the cost of the phone or computer. It's a step in the right direction.

Cheers to the government

Re:This is not very Cheap for most Indians

[doktor-hladnjak]

The cost of this is not inexpensive if you consider what most indians make at a yearly level. Not to mention the cost of the phone or computer. It's a step in the right direction.

Yes, this is really not cheap, even for people making good money in India. A friend of mine was telling me how a couple of years ago, he got an offer of around $750/month, right out of college for some sort of programming job. He said this was an obscene amount of money, not just by the standards of the average Indian, but also by other friends who had gotten IT-related jobs. He seemed to think it was comparable to making close to 6 figures in USD. I've had other friends say things like "multiply by 60" to get the idea of how much lower the cost of everyday items (food, clothing, etc) is.

So, the cost for this is something like 1/40 of even a well-off middle class Indian.

Re:This is not very Cheap for most Indians

[jhunsake]

It's really not cheap given what you're getting either.

Re:This is not very Cheap for most Indians

[Anonymous Coward]

This really isn't even that great of a deal...

My local isp offers unlimited 128kbps server for $15.45 / month. Although you have to have cable tv service from them as well to get this deal. It's not the fastest in the world, but it gets the job done, and it quite a bit less than an extra phone line + isp. Heck it even competes with dialup prices. The city I live in does it's own power distribution, cable tv, and internet. I believe they're basically just running a service for the city, and trying to break even at the same time.

Re:This is not very Cheap for most Indians

[doktor-hladnjak]

Oops... I mean 1/40 of the *income*. Freudian slip from reading too many "Indians cost nothing to employ and are stealing all our jobs" rants on slashdot? I'll let you decide.

Re:This is not very Cheap for most Indians

[Musashi Miyamoto]

Multiply by 60? Wow. Since an IT worker in India might make $5000, multiplying by 60 would make it $300K.

Either the multiplier is wrong, or (more likely) the cost of living as compared with wages is much higher in the USA.

First reaction was "Great!" until I asked myself

[RLiegh]

What is the cost of living like in India?

If it's decent, does that mean that there's a greater chance that Open Source will spread with the easier availability of iso's and ftp installs?

Etherlinx

[ih8apple]

Have you guys heard of Etherlinx?

Apparently, they have their own way of rolling out cheap broadband. Anyone have any idea on whether their super-sized WiFi works?

Sign Me Up!

[RyansPrivates]

That beats the hell out of the $100/month I pay now! Yeah it's slower, but its still fast enough to visit these /.'ed websites. I will definitely get this if someone can tell me if I can transfer my high.iq domain to their IP range... ;-)

isdn

[papasui]

Jeez and all this time I thought ISDN stood for 'Insanely stupid dial-up networking'.

Re:isdn

[dacarr]

No, sir, it stands for "It still does nothing".

Nice solution for the digital divide

[Omega1045]

There are a lot of people out there that cannot afford $40+ a month for screaming fast Internet access. Many others simply won't pay. On the surface, this looks to be an excellent tool to help us bridge the digital divide. Let the "poor" kids have some decent Internet access.

Plus, true 128 is soooo much faster that 56k (which is usually 28.8 - 44ish).

Re:Nice solution for the digital divide

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh who fell for this troll post? This article has nothing to do with bridging the digital divide. As a dozen others have posted this is actually an expensive proposition based on India's cost of living. This isn't going to bring the internet to the poor of India (who can barely feed themselves). This poster threw out some generic babble and somebody bit.

Sounds expensive to me

[openSoar]

other than some bizarre anomolies like the cost of living in bombay being the highest in the world at one time, the average salary in india is miniscule compared to (say) the western world. $16 a month or so for net access is a 1/2 to 1/3 of what you can pay here in california for a much faster service.

Ok, someone is forgetting to think

[rzbx]

"best part is that the cost of Plan I (which has a data transfer limit of 500 megs) is only Rs 825 ($ 16.50)"

Sure, for us $16.50 doesn't sound bad, but in India where they obviously make more than we do (*sarcasm*)?
Btw, what is this "Rs", CIA world factbook shows "Indian rupee (INR)" as being India's currency?

Re:Ok, someone is forgetting to think

[maxbang]

Rs is how Indians write rupees. Contrary to Western beliefs, rupees are not magical multicolored gems found in various pots/jars, held in a giant's wallet, or tallied in the lower right hand corner of a television screen.

Re:Ok, someone is forgetting to think

[Anonymous Coward]

>> Rs is how Indians write rupees.

It is India's money and they have the right to write it anyways right???... Anyway INR is never used to quote the Indian currency, except in the CIA factbook. Ignorance at it s best !!!

Re:Ok, someone is forgetting to think

[u19925]

and what the hell is this "$" thing? CIA world factbook shows USD as being USA currency.

Many countries use dollar as their currency; so for offical purpose, US currency is designated as USD. Similarly, many countries use "Rupee" as currency, so Indian currency is abbreviated as INR (INdian Rupee).

The plan being expensive or not should be based on regional pricing. 825 rupees a month for "always on" connection is cheaper by existing Indian pricing (if you are a moderate user).

Yes, India IS poor, so almost everything is expensive compared to their income (isn't it the definition of being poor?). Instead of saying it too expensive, it should be looked at it this way. The average telephone bill in India is about Rs. 1500/month. So most people who have telephone, fall in the affordable range at this internet pricing.

Re:Ok, someone is forgetting to think

[bheer]

... and INR is how the Indian Rupee is written formally (e.g. in financial transactions) where you don't want to confuse it with the Indonesian Rupiah, the Pakistani Rupee, the Nepali Rupee, etc.

But yes, in informal usage "Rs" is used exclusively.

Re:Ok, someone is forgetting to think

[rsidd]

CIA world factbook shows "Indian rupee (INR)" as being India's currency?

Just as the currency in the US is the USD, in the UK it's the GBP, in Switzerland it's the CHF. But not in daily life.

500 MiB?

[stratjakt]

Either way, that's what I'd do on a busy day with a 56k dialup (downloading 24 hours straight).

Sounds like a pretty harsh limit, considering over here you could get an unlimited dialup account for about the same cost, and be able to pull off 30*500 = 15,000 MiB a month.

Oh well, I guess those guys are too busy taking over grunt level IP jobs to be leeching anyways.


begin rant

All you slashbots, stop saying MB (megabyte) when you mean MiB (mibibyte). Mega = 10^6 = 1,000,000, MiB = 2^20 = 1048576

It's needlessly confusing to overload an existing term when theres a perfectly good (and standard) term.

end rant

The real dirt

[kewsh]

After reading this article I msg'd a punjab I know on IRC for his insight. He told me his family back in India tried this service and found it to be much slower than 128k most of the time and outages were frequent. So I guess you can say the "cheap" price reflects the quality of the servers hosting the service.

Re:The real dirt

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Re:The real dirt

[bheer]

Considering this service has just started, that too as a pilot project (available initially in one exchange per city), I'd have to say that your `punjab' friend was talking through his turban. :)

Re:The real dirt

[Anonymous Coward]

After reading this article I msg'd a punjab I know on IRC for his insight. He told me his family back in India tried this service and found it to be much slower than 128k most of the time and outages were frequent. So I guess you can say the "cheap" price reflects the quality of the servers hosting the service.

Look at the map to find the distance between the state of Punjab and West Bengal (where the company is located) !! Punjab is on the west of country and West Bengal is on the east !! Your IRC buddy probably didn't have any idea what you were talking about !!

Re:The real dirt

[bablooo]

and just to point out that you are utterly full of shit, this service is only available at Calcutta, right now, so no possibility of asking someone at Punjub and geting a correct response. Calcutta telephones have been a pioneer within its own corporate entity (BSNL) to provide newer options for the last few months now.

Re:First reaction was "Great!" until I asked mysel

[raju1kabir]

Typical household income is about $1500/year. So that's like someone in the US paying $500/month for DSL.

in a country where a decent meal is 25 cents...

[donkiemaster]

$16.50 is quite a lot of money

128 kbps is hardly broadband

[squarooticus]

That's about twice what a good modem offers these days. It might have better latency than a modem, but bandwidth? You can't get anything better than the poor-quality video streams from the web news sites with 128 kbps, and you certainly can't reliably stream 128 kbps MP3, which itself isn't CD-quality.

I have 640/128 DSL, and while the 640 is nice and speedy and supports most of the media I want, the 128 up is terribly slow and won't even allow me to stream Oggs (192 kbps) from my home to my workplace.

"Broadband" means something different now than it did 5 years ago.

Re:128 kbps is hardly broadband

[dotgod]

quite true. See here.

Re:128 kbps is hardly broadband

[dissy]

*sigh* and slashdot JUST had an article on this in the past week.

> 128 kbps is hardly broadband

How do you figure based on that information?

Is a blue car fast?
Is a baby that crys tall?
Is a sharp knife long?

> 128 kbps is hardly broadband

128 kbps - this is a speed, measuring a type of bandwidth.
is hardly - this is (basically) a logical 'not'.
broadband - this is the type of carrier data is sent over.

You realize if a pair of wires uses a protocol to send both IP data and any other data at all that isnt IP, it is broadband, EVEN if the IP data can only be sent at 10 bytes per second?

The article describes this as having both phone/voice service as well as IP service over it.
Unless they are actually encapsulating one form of data over the other, like true ISDN does, then it is broadband. period. nothing about the speed comes into play here.

> "Broadband" means something different now than it did 5 years ago.

No, its always meant the same thing from when the terms 'broadband' and 'baseband' were made. You are just using it incorrectly.

Re:128 kbps is hardly broadband

[squarooticus]

Sorry to disappoint you, but language is not static, and "broadband" has come to mean "high capacity." That's just the way it is.

Re:128 kbps is hardly broadband

[dissy]

> Sorry to disappoint you, but language is not static, and "broadband" has come to
> mean "high capacity." That's just the way it is.

I don't care what it has come to mean to a few people. Those few are wrong. That's just the way it is.

If you plan to redefine a word from what its been since the word was made, atleast have the decency to say so and not expect others to magically understand.

Why even have words if the meanings are totally different and random from person to person? Thats why a language aggrees that a word means one particular thing, then its defined. That is what the dictonary is handy for.

Websters defines broadband as:

broadband

adj 1: of or relating to or being a communications network in which the bandwidth can be divided and shared by multiple simultaneous signals (as for voice or data or video) 2: responding to or operating at a wide band of frequencies; "a broadband antenna"


Other than in the marketing department of US based cable/dsl companys, and thus in their customers imaginations, where else is broadband known to mean anything other than what the dictionary defines it as?

I guess you believe everything you hear on TV or that is forced down your throat from a corporation.

Re:128 kbps is hardly broadband

[squarooticus]

Long ago, I was as pedantic as you are regarding language, always nitpicking on details of the language that conflicted with the dictionary or with an 8th grade grammar book.

Then, one day, I realized that the point of language is communication: despite what some English teachers might tell you, language isn't a static set of rules that were devised by some command authority, but is rather a fluid medium with which people exchange ideas.

In this particular case, broadband has come to mean "high capacity." That's how the vast majority---VAST majority---of people use it, and that is therefore the least confusing definition. In your particular domain and among your coworkers or buddies, broadband may mean something different, but to the general public, broadband means what I have said. This is a fact, and indisputable.

Look, I understand what you're saying, but the meaning has changed and you should just get over it and move on.

Re:128 kbps is hardly broadband

[drinkypoo]

You realize if a pair of wires uses a protocol to send both IP data and any other data at all that isnt IP, it is broadband, EVEN if the IP data can only be sent at 10 bytes per second?

It's my impression that it's broadband if it sends data using multiple frequencies or frequency ranges. After all, you can send IP and IPX over a modem connection, but that doesn't make it broadband. Modems have ~8KHz of bandwidth, cable modems (at least DOCSIS) have 8MHz (downstream), that's wider by a factor of 1k (2^10).

Meanwhile ISDN is digital, it is definitely not broadband, and it's 128kbps and can definitely carry multiple protocols, so your definition of broadband still doesn't wash.

Re:128 kbps is hardly broadband

[Anonymous Coward]

" the 128 up is terribly slow and won't even allow me to stream Oggs (192 kbps) from my home to my workplace."

What??? put them on a CD and take them to work, even a huge music collection would fit on half a dozen,

Stop wasting the internet resources when there is a better and easier method.

Re:128 kbps is hardly broadband

[squarooticus]

My music collection (all legal, just so you know) won't fit on half a dozen 4.7GB DVD-R's. I have currently backed up 11,000 tracks on 14 DVD-R's. You'd make the perfect government bureaucrat: "I don't see a need for it, so obviously no one needs it! Woohoo!"

Re:128 kbps is hardly broadband

[Penguinoflight]

Well, you also have to look at the root meaning of words. Broad and Band.

1 a : having ample extent from side to side or between limits "broad shoulders" b : having a specified extension from side to side "made the path 10 feet broad" 2 : extending far and wide : SPACIOUS "the broad plains"

And band, which has about six definitions for two.. all either meaning a strip of something, or someting to hold something together.

The opposite of broad being narrow.. broadband would have to be more broad than another "bandwidth", to be properly defined.

So, as it is with broad being relative, you can't say that all networks fitting into the definition of "broadband" are really broadband, because it's mutually exclusive.

The solution? require ISPs to list the speed on the front page. but then, they'd have to think about reasonable rates... what a phenomenon! Just think if starband had to start advertising 256k/128k for ONLY $79/month!!

Re:128 kbps is hardly broadband

[inkswamp]

In this particular case, broadband has come to mean "high capacity." That's how the vast majority---VAST majority---of people use it

For the most part, I agree with you and feel the same way, but how do you respond to people who claim that Unix isn't an operating system? The vast majority of people think of an operating system as the GUI-based experience and the consumer-friendly applications you get when you buy a Windows or Macintosh machine. Therefore, Unix isn't an operating system (according to the masses.)

Re:128 kbps is hardly broadband

[squarooticus]

Interesting question; but in this case, I don't actually think most people have a clear idea of what an operating system. My father heard about Linux two years ago and wanted to install it, and had no problem with me referring to it as an operating system.

Remember that I'm not saying broadband can't refer to what the the other guy said; I'm just saying that the term has at the very least been overloaded to mean what I said, and that the term has come to mean exactly what I said to the vast majority of people because it's the term trotted out by various companies selling "broadband" to advertise their otherwise generic service.

Microsoft doesn't talk about "operating systems": it talks about "Windows," and would prefer you to think there isn't an alternative, so why clutter the mind with the fact that Windows belongs to a class that has other members? :)

Cheers,
Kyle

Re:128 kbps is hardly broadband

[dissy]

> Then, one day, I realized that the point of language is communication:

But we are miscommunicating due to not agreeing on what this word means.

> In this particular case, broadband has come to mean "high capacity."

Simply reading this thread will go to prove why this is a silly argument.

Other than the people that define broadband as the term was invented to be used, you have alot of people on slashdot, each one saying something that generally begins with "Well, i personally think broadband means _________ so this (is/isnt)"

Out of everyone, the two of us included, everyone can argue on what they THINK the word means, and all be totally different, but the way I use it is the way its defined and in this case why the word even exists at all.

If so many people are confused as to what broadband means (Which seems to be alot of people posting in this thread, including one persons reply to my first post, no not yourself) how can that possibly help make communication better?

If you look at all the people that say 'broadband means atleast this speed' and the speed is always different and based on different things, that isnt helping in languages point of communicating an idea.

Besides, its fairly pointless to assign a word to mean 'at or above this numerical value'. Thats what numbers are for.
I mean, you name technologys and communication methods. You list the speed seperate.
You dont use the word 'modem' to mean 56k, as modems go all the way down to 50baud. You dont use the term DSL to mean a meg/second for the same reason, it comes in different speeds.

Broadband is what DSL is. Why use one to mean speed and not the other?
Broadband is what alot of communiaction mediums are, not all of which are anywhere near fast in speed.

Its like calling americans stupid, then defining 'earthling' as being of this planet (which includes americans) and trying to say the word earthing means stupid.

Americans could very well be stupid, but just because some other word happens to include americans in what it describes, doesnt automatically mean that word is limited just to characteristics of americans.

Broadband describes much more than DSL, so its silly to claim broadband would mean one small characteristic of DSL.

Everyone was posting what they thought the word meant, they were all wrong, so I posted in order to provide the actual definition of the word, which is the way its suppost to be used.

Once i did that, all confusion on what broadband means is removed, because (ideally) we should agree on the higher authority (Not me, the dictonary, and/or the person that coined the word) of what the word means, and be able to then communicate the idea of what is and isnt broadband.

I would also like to close by saying your definition of the word broadband still doesnt define broadband!

Q: What is broadband?
A: broadband has come to mean "high capacity."

ok, so what is "high capacity." ?

and with that question, we are back to the thread as it currently stands, with people each throwing in their 'i think it should be ____'

Please, if you mean high capacity, say that instead of broadband, even not knowing yourself what that is (its not like 5 geeks in the same room will aggree on what is 'high capacity')

Broadband has a definition already, and its a very clear and binary one.
Please dont turn this very clearly defined word into another (well two others for high capacity) that still have little meaning nor communicate much in the way of an idea.

"high speed" changes as the max limit of speed of the current technology changes.
Remember, in the 70's a 56k digital line was ungodly fast.
by todays standards it isnt at all.
by todays standards a gig a second is fast, but someday, it wont be.

broadband is broadband, and its definition will never need to change with time to describe what it does.

Re:128 kbps is hardly broadband

[dissy]

> Well, you also have to look at the root meaning of words. Broad and Band.

Actually the term was coined and is meant as one single word.
The oposit is baseband

Also the dictonary agrees with me :}


broadband

adj 1: of or relating to or being a communications network in which the bandwidth can be divided and shared by multiple simultaneous signals (as for voice or data or video) 2: responding to or operating at a wide band of frequencies; "a broadband antenna"

communications - A transmission medium capable of supporting a
wide range of frequencies, typically from audio up to video
frequencies. It can carry multiple signals by dividing the
total capacity of the medium into multiple, independent
bandwidth channels, where each channel operates only on a
specific range of frequencies.


In the case of DSL, its IP and phone.
In the case of cable, its IP and video/audio.

In the case of ISDN, a modem, or a T1, its all Data.
Even a modem is only data OVER a voice medium.. modems use phonelines, which are audio only.
ISDN is the reverse, its voice OVER data. But ISDN is data only. As its T1 and greater (Which is just ISDN as well)

> The solution? require ISPs to list the speed on the front page. but then, they'd
> have to think about reasonable rates... what a phenomenon! Just think if starband
> had to start advertising 256k/128k for ONLY $79/month!!

That however is 100% correct, and companys should have to do this.
Of course that lets them scam people less, so they wont. But heres to hoping with ya :}

Re:128 kbps is hardly broadband

[scot4875]

If so many people are confused as to what broadband means (Which seems to be alot of people posting in this thread, including one persons reply to my first post, no not yourself) how can that possibly help make communication better?

Well, use context. It helps. When someone says "128k isn't broadband," use the context clue of "128k" to mean that they're referring to bandwidth capacity, not broad/baseband and what's actually going over the wire.

If someone says "my broadband connection carries my voice, data, and cable" they more likely are actually talking about the fact that there are 3 signals on the wire.

You wouldn't read "We ran cat-5 to every room in the house" to mean "We ran the feline numbered '5' all over the house," would you?

--Jeremy

Re:128 kbps is hardly broadband

[dissy]

> When someone says "128k isn't broadband," use the context clue of "128k" to mean
> that they're referring to bandwidth capacity, not broad/baseband and what's
> actually going over the wire.

What? huh?

Someone said "128k isn't broadband"
That statement is false.

Both words are present, so they were clearly referring to both its bandwidth, and its broadband status, in the same line, then making a comparison saying the two are not equal.

Even using your statement, and i assume they are talking about bandwidth anyways.
Ok, so?
"128k isn't broadband" is still false for ANY value of bandwidth you could possibly stick in there!

Highlights issues w/ US ISPs

[drgroove]

This article really serves to highlight issues w/ US-based ISPs and the services they offer.

What are the options for a US citizen to get online right now?

1. Pay AOL || MSN || Earthlink $20> / mo. for dialup
2. Pay local Cable or Telephony Monopoly $50> / mo. for "broadband"

US ISP have some serious issues w/ their services - essentially, theres price fixing in both dialup and DSL/Cable options, which the FCC and the FTC are ignoring; despite continuous adoption of broadband, prices have yet to drop in the slightest - in fact, broadband providers regularly announce additional restrictions on bandwidth, personal site/email hosting, file upload/download, P2P file sharing, etc.

It just seems like for all of our technological advantages, the US should have the highest rate of households w/ broadband, at the lowest prices, in comparison to any other nation. Instead, you have telephony companies in India providing their customers with affordable broadband, and nations like South Korea with the highest levels per capita of broadband usage.

Re:Highlights issues w/ US ISPs

[donkiemaster]

and still Northpoint DSL went out of business and Covad is sucking wind hardcore. Doesn't seem like to me they are gouging prices...Smaller close-knit countries with uniform telecom systems have a much better chance of providing broadband to more people. In the US it's too spread out, the type of DSL and cable broadband systems vary from region to region. I have had 7 different locations dsl lines in the last 5 years and have required 6 different hardware devices because they were almost all unique systems. (even though 3 of them were verizon)

Re:Highlights issues w/ US ISPs

[dledeaux]

The problem with the US is that we are, ironically, technophobic and very profit oriented.

We are slow to adopt new technologies. We see this in the cell phone industry, where other countries have a 2 year lead on cell phone technology compared with the US.

(This must be marvelous for the cell phone manufactures since they continue to reap profits on technology that is, according to the rest of the world, obsolete.)

The other problem is nobody wants to do anything unless they are going to be assured a profit. For example, SBC is reluctant now to roll out any more "last mile" additions to their DSL infrastructure since is will merely provide an avenue for other DSL providers to make more money off of their work. So they'd rather play they "if we can't have it, nobody can game" and make the general populace suffer.

Those two reasons in my opinion are why we don't, and will not for some time, see cheap reliable broadband being delivered in a timely manner.

Re:Highlights issues w/ US ISPs

[sneakcjj]

$16.50 for 128kbps is VERY expensive when considered with broadband prices. US based broadband prices are significantly cheaper than this. To get 1.5 at the same scale would be $196. So your accusation of price fixing U.S. broadband doesn't hold water. Dialup is still pretty close since there is a transfer cap.

The government (especially in Illinois) really screwed SBC over. They LOSE money on every line that a third-party provider installs. SBC has to give it to them below their cost. That is why you don't see DSL getting rolled out in more areas. The phone company CAN do it but they WON'T do it. Would you do something if you knew for a fact you would lose money? The phone company still has to make money to pay all their people. I can get 1.5Mbps SDSL if they fired up the RT I'm connected to but since they haven't I'm stuck with 384/128.

Cable modems are also expensive to rollout but the cable company doesn't have to share (go figure). Your $50 a month is a drop in the bucket compared to what it costs to install the cable modem infrastructure (even when added up over a year or so).

Please, try being your own ISP before complaining when your ISP is restricting you at $50 a month.

For my business I pay $500 a month for a T1 with NO CAPS/RESTRICTIONS WHAT SO EVER. If you want the same get something similiar or get 'business' class.

Oh, and de glad you don't live in Australia.

Re:Highlights issues w/ US ISPs

[Beatbyte]

The problem with the price fixes in the US has all to do with monopolies. I know this first hand.

If I could pay 100 bucks a month for a PRI/T1, then I would charge my normal ratio of customers per line with the lower cost involved.

Unfortunately, like most of the US, my ISP runs where there is only 1 telco. That 1 telco, does not like to drop its prices at all. Whether or not their cost goes down.

Re:Highlights issues w/ US ISPs

[Bodrius]

This seems a bit simplistic.

Let's go over this step by step:

1) There is such a thing as a stable price in the market, that is, a price fixed by the market itself.
Just because prices don't drop any more as the market expands does not mean the price is being "fixed" by the providers. MAYBE dropping the price is not cost-effective any more, MAYBE it wouldn't win enough new clients to offset the lost revenue, and they wouldn't lose clients by keeping the current price.
Companies are not obligated to reduce prices in a free market, they will do so only if it's in their best interest. Currently people ARE willing to pay 50 bucks for broadband, and the lack of competition means no one is making a better offer.
The problem is a lack of suppliers (monopoly if you will), not a cartel.

2) Broadband is a relatively new product with relatively new problems. It is not rare for the supplier to refine the restrictions of the service if, say, P2P sharing completely changes their forecasted costs. Their alternative is to raise the prices.
Remember that the "broadband market" defined pricing according to the telephone market, which arrived at its current pricing after a long time of evolution.
This brought a whole set of advantages and problems that may or may not be useful to apply to broadband: constant per-month fees instead of charging per bandwidth , PPPoE and similar contraptions to simulate a dial-up connection, which I assume lets them count minutes and some average bandwidth to calculate an average cost per client, to calculate the flat fee.
They didn't name that flat price thinking you would use more bandwidth as a Kazaa user than your typical commercial website (which pays for bandwidth through the nose). And it does cost money.
I know they are often draconian and show the insight of a panicked mob in a burning movie theater, but these restrictions are not an artificial way of raising the prices as you seem to indicate, and are not an exclusive problem of Telecoms. Universities have had to do the same when they found that P2P among students was consuming all the bandwidth, which they needed for research and university-stuff (you know, the stuff that gets you grants and pays for the bandwidth in the first place).

3) Just because telephony companies in India are providing broadband affordable to US citizens doesn't mean that it's affordable, or even comparatively lower-priced, for Indians.
Before thinkind "damn, that's cheap" consider your salary. Then use google to find the salary for your position somewhere in India. Repeat for 10 or 15 other countries.
Then, if you still think the comparison makes sense, find out how much a hamburger costs in those 15 other countries compared with the cost in the US.
A dollar does not have the same value anywhere in the world. The very prosperity that gives the US a technological and economic advantage means that the cost of life will be higher, if compared dollar by dollar, with the rest of the world... because acquiring said dollars is easier and less costly, and therefore the dollar has less value.

4) There are other reasons besides cost to adopt a new technology.
Maybe other uses that don't apply to the US makes them popular: in much of Latin America, the Telecomms are so bad that having a cellular phone is a necessity. They are more expensive than in the US, both in service and hardware, but traditional phones are unreliable and/or more expensive (no flat fee).
Maybe different lifestyles have translated in different tastes for different products: the popularity of wireless devices in Japan may have to do with their unbridled consumerism (which puts the US to shame), or with the obsession of Japanese pop culture with cute tiny things, or with the fact that the general purpose workstation (PC) was not as popular out of the office as function specific devices... or all of these.
Maybe availability is harder to achieve in the US than in other countries. Get a

Re:Highlights issues w/ US ISPs

[rootrider]

Unfortunately, like most of the US, my ISP runs where there is only 1 telco.

More and more cities in the US are gaining second cable companies, most of which are government owned or subsidized. These companies are under strict competition regulations (unlike the private cable companies that have enjoyed a bit of a monopoly for quite some time). These new cable companies have also been offering better deals, or atleast cheaper service. Tacoma, WA was one of the first cities to start a city-owned cable company. They provide a really sweet cable TV package for $30/month including digital music channels. Their Internet access is funneled through several private ISP's in order to help foster competition. You can get 1mbps/128kbps (guaranteed - often surpasses those 'limits') for $30/month. You used to be able to get twice that (2mb/256k) for the same price and then 4mb/512k for $70 (iirc), but that's changed, apparently to help allow for more users on the network. Either way, I get cable installed tomorrow ;)

nice idea but NOT BROADBAND

[Anonymous Coward]

sorry, but a 6.4 KB connection at best, does not a broadband connection make. Easy on the surfing and email but next to useless for antthing that broadband is marketed for.

$16.50!!

[mike_scheck]

Thats insane! Do you know how many Java developers $16.50 would buy? I bet your IT management does....

Re:First reaction was "Great!" until I asked mysel

[Anonymous Coward]

Depends on the caste your born into. The higher castes live pretty much like any first world country, the lower ones in some of the worst poverty in the world.

The fun thing about castes is, you cant do anything about it. Your mom was a toilet scrubber? Your a toilet scrubber, and your kids, and your kids kids.

(Now someone respond and tell me that the caste system doesnt exist anymore, and mod me as troll, but it's absolutely true and I've seen it first hand)

500 megs?

[grub]

Hell, even cheap broadband providers in NA let you snag ~5 GB.

Re:500 megs?

[saskboy]

I think the RIAA has got to the Indian government!

This is probably their way of insuring the Internet isn't used properly, such as in the download and distribution of Debbie Does Dallas.

They want to force us to do frivilous things like search google, conduct research, and read /.

The bastards!

Re:500 megs?

[Anonymous Coward]

Just gives people more reasons NOT to display pop-ups or image-ads on web-sites.

It also forces the population into a "consumer" position - where you can't publish anything on your own, etc. (many ISPs do that by blocking port 80).

It also provides "business class" ISPs ability to leverage their offering enough speed to do video conferencing, etc.

Consumers are already striking back, with high speed large (city/neighbourhood-wide) local networks, etc.

This is not Cheap!

[osho_gg]

Those from India subcontinent will know that considering the cost of living, cost of man-power (technical) and cost of running a business: this is not cheap at all. Even at this price, most middle class families with 2 kids in the school won't be able to afford this internet. Osho

Argh!

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean third-world countries are getting broadband before I do?

Re:Argh!

[saskboy]

"You mean third-world countries are getting broadband before I do?"

Yes, even Canada has had broadband for a decade now. ;-)

Re:Population

[Anonymous Coward]

India has a lower population density than Japan.

OTOH, mass usage of Slashdot there will definitely reduce the population, since Slashdot is the most effective girl repellent known to man.

Re:First reaction was "Great!" until I asked mysel

[SoftCoreHonesty]

Actually since the US average salary is around $20,000 it would be the equivalent of $213/month. Of course, either way this is a flawed argument because the guy who makes the average in either country isn't probably buying this type of service.

Re:Population

[Anonymous Coward]

>> 1/3 of those people are under the age of 14. FOr comparison about 21% of Americans are under 14.

That's also because they die younger.

But still, I agree with you. And we both know that linux is the most effective birth control for men that's ever been created.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Result...

[Anonymous Coward]

...lost of very skinny web-savy Indians!

Re:First reaction was "Great!" until I asked mysel

[MeanE]

"So that's like someone in the US paying $500/month for DSL."

Soooo...your saying the prices are much better there?

Re:First reaction was "Great!" until I asked mysel

[glesga_kiss]

The higher castes live pretty much like any first world country, the lower ones in some of the worst poverty in the world.

Most western cultures are the same. We just pretend it's different, and allow the token person through to the upper levels now and again. We also have a lot of poverty that is completely ignored, entire communities of homeless people. When was the last time you saw a poor family finance one of their children through higher education?

and tell me that the caste system doesnt exist anymore

While they're at it, maybe they should explain how the class system doesn't exist anymore.

825 rupees?

[BitwizeGHC]

Do you realize how many Moblins I have to kill to get 825 frickin' rupees?

Geez...

Way to expensive

[rxed]

The average daily earning of an adult male (!) in India is estimated to be in the range of Rs. 80. If your internet connection is Rs. 825... well, can you do the math.

Re:First reaction was "Great!" until I asked mysel

[malfunct]

If you throw in a correction for Cost of Goods (food/housing/utilities) you might find that the average salary in india is way different even that your "correct" estimate. Its sort of apples to oranges because they are somewhat isolated markets.

It is fucking ISDN !!!

[johnjaydk]

After checking out the whitepaper it's plain to see that this is ISDN.

For the telecom impaired: With ISDN you get three channels: two 64 Kbit/s voice/data pipes and a d-channel for signalling.

This boils down to the fact that when no phone calls are taking place you get 128kbit/s. Then a call comes in and tells your isdn modem-thing via the d-channel. The modem-thing drops one of the two 64kbit/s tupes and the call is set up while data traffic continues at 64kbit/s.

Any plain old ISDN router can play that game.

Anyway this is so 80's...

These days few telco's even bother with anything else but ADSL.

Re:It is fucking ISDN !!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah no doubt. I disconnected isdn 4 years ago.

Re:It is fucking ISDN !!!

[Pointy_Hair]

That's what I thought too. The technology is similar wrt to the 64k channels, but that's where it ends. The difference is that ISDN is an end-to-end connection over the PSTN, only packet based instead of analog. This deal takes the data part off at the curb and distributes it to an ISP ala broadband. Only the broadband part isn't exactly all that broad (64/128k on this versus 1.5M+ on cable).

Re:It is fucking ISDN !!!

[johnjaydk]

The only difference is with regard to billing. It's a good old ISDN that's always on. And charged via the router instead of based on call-detail records (CDRs). Somebody just discovered that they could get a sweet deal on old isdn gear and at the same time had switch (as in telephone exchange) capacity to spare. No revolition here, move along

. If walk like a dog and balk like a dog, it is a dog.

Re:First reaction was "Great!" until I asked mysel

[raju1kabir]

Actually since the US average salary is around $20,000 it would be the equivalent of $213/month.

Notice where I wrote "household income"?

Of course, either way this is a flawed argument because the guy who makes the average in either country isn't probably buying this type of service.

It's the best argument that can be made without detailed breakdowns of income segment size. It establishes a basis for comparison.

The average daytime max temperature in New York in January is 3C and the average daytime max in Bangkok that month is 31C. Would you say that a comparison based on those stats is flawed, because in fact that particular temperature is only reached for a small part of the day? I'd say it still tells us quite a bit about the relative climates in the two places.

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The Cost of Living in India

[scotpurl]

It varies by region. In Kolkata, the "living wage" or minimum wage is about 2,200-2,400 Rs. per month, but the actual wage many people are paid is about half this (or less).

Food prices in Rupees per kilogram, or per piece (I don't remember which), at the College Street Market (in Kolkata) when I was there in January of this year:
potato 5, onion 5-6, peas 8, cabbage 3, bean 6, tomato 6, carrot 8, brinjal 8, gourd 5, palang 5, rohu fish (cut) 80, mutton 140, chicken 75.

While it's cheap by U.S. standards, it's still a fortune by Indian standards. 840 is dinner for 4 people at Peter Cat, an upscale, trendy, expensive restaurant (where someone bought me dinner), and the guy buying dinner winced when he saw the bill (a local physician).

Re:The Cost of Living in India

[bheer]

Calcutta (Kolkata) is actually one of the poorest metropolises in India, and it has one of the lowest costs of living in urban India. On the other hand, that minimum wage of Rs 2000 is for unskilled workers. For a person with a engineering degree, 5000-6000 would be a more realistic minimum wage .

840 is dinner for 4 people at Peter Cat, an upscale, trendy, expensive restaurant (where someone bought me dinner), and the guy buying dinner winced when he saw the bill (a local physician).

I've been to Peter Cat before, and I'll say this: it's great, but compared with upscale restaurants throughout the country, it's cheap. Dinner for two at a similar place in Madras can easily set you back Rs 1000, and Bombay and Delhi are even more expensive.

Re:First reaction was "Great!" until I asked mysel

[RealityMogul]

Haven't you heard of Verizon?

Re:First reaction was "Great!" until I asked mysel

[spRed]

Typical household income is about $1500/year. So that's like someone in the US paying $500/month for DSL.

It would be better to compare it to the salaries of people in the areas where it is available (I don't have those fig'ers). Western countries have fairly even income distributions. In India you have the non-cash/barter economies in rural areas and the more comparable cash economies in cities. So the subsistance farmers [that don't have access to this service] drive the averages way down.

It would still be expensive compared to the US cost of broadband, but not /as/ bad.

Re:First reaction was "Great!" until I asked mysel

[SoftCoreHonesty]

How do you have a community of homeless people? Are you saying they are houseless but all live together? Homeless implies someone wandering the streets with nowhere to sleep at night. A community implies a place they can always go to sleep. I would also question how many of these people live like this by choice. They often would rather live on the streets than take handouts from the government. Many of them are also mentally handicap and almost all of them have a drug or alcohol problem.

I think you also don't really understand what a caste system is. In a caste system you cannot move up. It is based on the Hindu belief of stages in life. What you are referring to is the difficulty to move out of poverty because the education that you need to move out of poverty is not available or inadequate. People do move from poverty into at least middle class occasionally and they are more than just a token few. The problem is that some of these people doom their childen to fall back into poverty by having too many of them.

10 lbs of crap in a 5 lb bag for only $16.50

[Pointy_Hair]

Yet another dot-com-esque internet solution. Provide a technology that carries n bandwidth. Then share it among 5,000 users who would use 1/10th of the available bandwidth at a "peak use moment". When n gets gobbled up (very quickly) then the advertised 128k or 64k doesn't happen even though it is theoretically possible. Someone who has used this has already mentioned that this doesn't work as advertised based on personal experience.

At least when I was using a Courier I-Modem doing dial on demand before the cable company brought in high-speed access, the telco part of my circuit was a full 128k or dropped to 64k if I used a channel for a voice call. Nothing was shared until I hit the ISP.

This Direct Internet Access System is a similar model that the broadband providers use - except it isn't broadband.

Spelling was correct

[Anonymous Coward]

HERE ME BITCH

thats is "HEAR" just incase someone reads this.

No, the spelling was correct. He just misplaced a comma. He meant:

HERE, ME BITCH

This is a "plug-and-play" DSL system.

[parc]

Highlights:

128k in two channels, one of which can be used for voice. Must be 3.5km from the CO.
2M in 64k channels, each of which can be dropped out for a telephone. Max length: 2km from the CO.

There is lifeline capability, but only through an external product.

Data connection: Ethernet. Not Fast Ethernet, just plain old Ethernet. Or two E1s. My guess is that the real throughput of the box is along the lines of 6-8 Mbps.
Voice connection: 2 E1s or 240 copper pair.

All in all, it looks like it's a simple system that any telco guy should be able to use to provide "instant" DSL. For true cheap high-speed access, it's worthless.

This is not too bad

[abhikhurana]

First, I am an Indian. Now to the ground reality in India. When I used to have a dialup connection, I used to pay Rs 24 per hour for phone charges and Rs 10 for internet. If I stay online for 2 hours in a day, that would mean I spend about 70 rupees a day. For 30 days, that would make it 2100 rupees or something like 45 USD per month for a crappy dialup. Compare this with this solition. I pay $16.50 and thats it. So IMHO, its not bad atall. But yes, Bengal, whose capital is Kolkatta, is maybe the only INdian state still ruled by commies, so don't expect the phone company to let lose its orn grip anytime soon. And quality of serivce is something I wud rather not comment out, it sucks too much. Actually its fine when it works.. but its when it doesnt work, then finding someone who knows aboutt the system is a nightmare. Nice idea though.

Re:This is not too bad

[cygnusx]

> But yes, Bengal, whose capital is Kolkatta, is maybe the only
> INdian state still ruled by commies, so don't expect the phone
> company to let lose its orn grip anytime soon.

s/Kolkatta/Kolkata (or just say Calcutta :-))

The entire country suffers from a very weird socialist hangover, so no point blaming the commies here. I mean, name one Indian political party that does not advocate a nanny-state.

Besides which, the phone company (BSNL) is owned by the union (==federal) government, not the state government, faces considerable competition in the market in both basic voice and cellular, and is likely to be privatized soon anyway.

I'd say this was a smart move by BSNL -- there were people who were (or were thinking of) surrendering their fixed line phones in favor of WLL and cellular phones. Offering a data pipe will give folk an incentive to stick on with their fixed lines.

Something more interesting in the western city of Pune (can't find a link for this, more details would be great: the local BSNL office is thinking of offering cable TV + data to customers, all on the same line. Considering how absolutely incompetent private cable operators in India are, a lot of people might just take up this offer.

In the end, I suspect BSNL (like many other telcos) will move into this model (one line offers cable tv+data+voice) because otherwise there's no real reason to have that wire come into your house.

Re:This is not too bad

[InDrUs]

In fact, BSNL has already started a pilot in Calutta to test the waters for what you have mentioned VoD + cable + data + basic phone services

http://www.calcuttatelephones.com/bbandservice.s ht ml

The pilot is being done at a place (an up-market residential block) hardly 2km from my place...

cheers,
indra

sounds shitty

[CrazyJim0]

I get 640k on my cable modem for under 50$ a month.

But wait this new technology is 1/5th as slow, and a data transfer cap? Where do I sign up?

Stop the "it's not cheap for Indians" already!

[arvindn]

I see a bunch of posts here saying its not cheap for Indians, yada yada. I see this in every story about India. Stop it and think rationally please. A PC costs about Rs 30000-40000 ($600-800). Now would someone who can afford a PC find it too much to pay Rs 850 per month for a 24 hour connection? No! Especially when you consider that it almost works out cheaper the phone bills for a dialup connection. The average Indian might be very poor, but so what? Those who can buy a computer are usually well off, and can afford this.

Me, I pay only Rs. 650 for a 24 hr connection (fibre optic, last mile copper cable; and yes, I'm from India). BW sucks, 64 kbps, download cap is 300 megs a month, but it's far better than dialup and sufficient for all my needs, and it lets me run a server, so I'm quite happy with it.

So this is a really good thing. I hope lots of people will use it. Quit whining.

Re:Stop the "it's not cheap for Indians" already!

[abhisarda]

Im from India too and am in India(Bangalore) right now(temporarily). This offer of 128k slowband(?) came out a month or so ago.

It took me 4 days just to get in contact with a person who knew about this system. This system is going to come to my area only after 3-4 months. Ill be gone from here by that time.

My uncle in Calcutta has got this service and he says it sucks big time. The 128k is closer to 56k and its not reliable at all. I have 64k cable right now and I am paying 23 $ for 600mb bandwidth cap.

Back in the US I was used to 1 gb(on 768k charter cable) a day downloads for 2 years. When I came back, I ran up bills of 500 $ in 3 months using a 56k modem. I switched to cable and still run up bills of about 100 $ a month for 3 Gb bandwidth usage. A 384k connection here costs ~620 $ a month, and I used to pay 23 $ for cable in the US. Broadband still ain't cheap in India. Too bad.

Re:First reaction was "Great!" until I asked mysel

[SoftCoreHonesty]

Ignoring the whole household vs salary argument (how many Indian families are multi-income?) take a look at the two important numbers here:

Indian Average Household Income - $2,847
Indian Median Household Income - $1,005

Source - Asian Demographics Note these are Urban households which is what is applicable in this case.

The reason for the huge difference is due to the huge gap between the poor and the wealthy in India. In the US the average is $49K and the median is $42K which is a much smaller gap.

In summary, the two things you need to take into consideration in your argument are the number of multi-income families in India (couldn't find that number) and the gap between the wealthy and the poor.

If you can't outcompete 3rd world workers...

[siskbc]

...you deserve your spot in the unemployment line.

Nice idea - maintain the low standard of living in India so undereducated, soft, lazy Americans can maintain their high standard of living.

It's amazing how people can believe in equal rights until it's they that have to give something up to a more talented but previously repressed foreign worker.

My advice? Start writing better code or further your education if you don't want your job given to someone willing to do a better job than you. And don't give me this outsourcing sob story - if your job can be done capably by someone who has virtually no contact with management, halfway around the world, then you're not doing a good job. If you are a good, educated programmer, you have nothing to worry about. If you have the ability to lead and manage projects, you have nothing to worry about. If not, then you're screwed, and you have no one to blame but yourself.

Re:If you can't outcompete 3rd world workers...

[Sky Lemon]

Hell I would be employee of the month each month I had 'virtually no contact with management'. :) I think what we need to do here in the U.S. to boost productivity is to use the 'virtually no contact with management' model by out sourcing managerial positions instead of technical positions. That way companies could save big on their payroll savings and since noone understands managers anyway there's no real 'language-barrier' that hasn't already been put in place.

Re:If you can't outcompete 3rd world workers...

[cmburns69]

if your job can be done capably by someone who has virtually no contact with management, halfway around the world, then you're not doing a good job. If you are a good, educated programmer, you have nothing to worry about.

This would be true if the only reason outsourcing happens was because of quality. Many times, outsourcing happens because it is simply cheaper to hire foreign workers.

In America, there is a high standard of living. This forces companies to pay more, so that the employees can live. It costs the company less if they're paying in Rupees instead of Dollars.

I'm not advocating oppression of any people. I just want people to know that quality is not the only reason for outsourcing.

An online Starcraft RPG? Only at
In Soviet Russia, all your us are belong to base.

Re:If you can't outcompete 3rd world workers...

[drinkypoo]

Sorry, but I have personally seen a number of indian workers in positions at Cisco which they were not in any way talented enough to fill, to the point where other (more capable) engineers had to hold their hand to make sure they didn't do more harm than good. They were hired strictly to fill quotas, not because they were the best applicants; Either that, or the pay was set so low as to chase away actually qualified applicants.

There's plenty of qualified immigrants in tech positions in the US, but don't pretend that all of them are there because they're better qualified.

Re:If you can't outcompete 3rd world workers...

[sisukapalli1]

I'm not advocating oppression of any people. I just want people to know that quality is not the only reason for outsourcing.

Even if the quality is not the reason, you should not care because free markets are supposed to be run like that -- just free. Any artificial restrictions are primarily unfair towards citizens of poorer nations.

If people are willing to buy low quality, cheap stuff, then the manufacturers of that stuff make a lot of profit. It applies for fast food, it applies for cars, and it will damn well apply for software products too.

S

Re:If you can't outcompete 3rd world workers...

[cyril3]

It's amazing how people can believe in equal rights

It's quite clear that equal rights are meant to apply only to Americans. I mean it's the Constitution of the United States of America. The Courts have found in many cases that it has no application to non-US citizens. And this has just dawned on Ashcroft. He's worked out that if you strip someone of their citizenship, they have no rights. The man is fucking brilliant, isn't he. No wonder they rule the world.

As for If you are a good, educated programmer, you have nothing to worry about.

how about

except someone who will do it cheaper because they live in a country with a cost of living 25% of yours.

More talented but previously repressed is bullshit. Indian software engineers haven't been repressed for a long time.. They have developed to be as good as but not necessarily better than Americans. They are however cheaper.

And to say you have no one to blame but yourself. because the cost of living is lower in India is utter crap

Re:If you can't outcompete 3rd world workers...

[Doctor52_B]

It's not a question of work quality. An electrical engineer in India with a bachelors degree and 3-4 years of experience earns about $8000 US per year. Wanna compete with that?

Re:If you can't outcompete 3rd world workers...

[siskbc]

It's not a question of work quality. An electrical engineer in India with a bachelors degree and 3-4 years of experience earns about $8000 US per year. Wanna compete with that?

IN INDIA. And if it's worth it, go to India and make that. Realistically, most Indian programmers working for US companies are living in the US, because they don't want to live in India much more than you do. So you're playing on a pretty level playing field.

As far as outsourcing work TO India, please find me an example of a company that farmed out work to India that wasn't bottom-of-the-barrel type work. So this only affects the crappiest American programmers. So I'm still not feeling the pity.

Bottom line is, if you're good at what you do, you'll have work. If you aren't, you might not. I'm still having a hard time seeing anything wrong with that. And I still want to know where all the programmers were when all the textile jobs moved to the South Pacific, and manufacturing jobs to Mexico. Seems a lot of people are spouting a different tune now that outsourcing has shifted to low-level white-collar jobs.

Re:If you can't outcompete 3rd world workers...

[Doctor52_B]

Read this http://www.outsource2india.com/why_india/articles/ global_giants_bullish.asp These are some big numbers cash and jobwise. A quick Google search will find plenty more. India, and the rest of Asia, has alot of smart, talented people who can live middle - class lifestyles on a whole lot less than it takes here. I work in manufacturing, and take it from me - companies will farm out anything they can to make an extra buck. This trend will affect more than just the "crappiest" programmers. Even if you are good at whatever you do, you may find yourself doing it for less pay than you like. A race to the bottom is an ugly thing.

Re:If you can't outcompete 3rd world workers...

[siskbc]

India, and the rest of Asia, has alot of smart, talented people who can live middle - class lifestyles on a whole lot less than it takes here

If there are that many smart talented people in India, it won't be long until they're running their own businesses. At that point, *they* will be hiring people, and India will be creating as many jobs as they "steal."

. I work in manufacturing, and take it from me - companies will farm out anything they can to make an extra buck.

Yeah, but they won't farm out stuff where there are significant IP issues at hand or where the product is more intellectual as opposed to physical. This is why I think we won't see the same sort of outsourcing in IT that we do in, say, cars.

As to your articles, a lot of it is intended to develop an IT industry in India. This is startup company funds - not outsourcing, which would be different. Tapping the Indian economy is a Good Thing, and will only serve to increase the cost and standard of living in those areas, as I discussed. The other thing they talk about is back-office type stuff, which is the dregs of programming, which I would expect to be outsourced.

So I'm still trying to find a company that closed a research center in this country and moved it to India. I can see a glut of mediocre programmers dragging down salaries of the mediocre. But if you have a degree from a good college, solid experience, and are a very talented coder, you won't have problems.

Re:If you can't outcompete 3rd world workers...

[Doctor52_B]

Is this what you're looking for? http://archive.infoworld.com/articles/hn/xml/02/10 /21/021021hnindia.xml?s=IDGNS Most of the companies mentioned in this article have laid off thousands of US workers. Now, they are expanding their Indian R&D operations.

Dialup costs almost Rs2000/month

[dharhas]

This actually paying Rs850 for always on internet is very reasonable for most middle class families. My parents back in India spend about an hour a day online. In India you *pay* for local phone calls unlike the US unlimited local service... So at approx Rs 1(conservatively) per min for phone charges thats already Rs1800. This doesn't even count the ISP charges which were about Rs 250 for 100 hours the last time I was there. Some ppl contacted my parents to see if they were interested in cable Internet for Rs1000 per month... Needless to say they were. On the other hand most govt run things in India suck big time.

- dharhas

Re:Population

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually that is less of an effect than you think. The life expectancy in India is about 60 vs 77 in the US. 14 years is about 20% of an Indian's life vs 18% of an American's life. 21% makes sense for an American but as you can see the 33% for Indian's is way high.

the major diffrence

[the_2nd_coming]

this shows the major diffrence between government services/corperations and public/private corperations.

the government does the job at or below cost (unless it is a semi independant corperation in which case they basicly operate in the red while striving for a profit...aka US Post Office and Amtrack) while private/publicly traded companies do things at cost and provide them for a large amount of money in comparison.

one offers cheep service to the public but is impossable to sustain, the other provides a reletivly expensive option but in most cases is sustainable....where is the middle ground?

Pricing..

[univgeek]

A lot of people seem to think that the pricing is too high. However, the target market - the middle-class/upper-class, could easily afford this. In my house the telephone bill (mostly due to net) comes to around Rs.2,500. I would jump at this opportunity, and so would almost all of my friends.

Now whether 128Kbps is broadband is a different argument, but it sure beats crappy 33.1Kbps, and there would be no per-minute charge!!

Slightly OT. The IIT (Indian Inst of Tech. ) decided a few years ago, that waiting for multi-nationals to bring in new tech that was cheap enough for use in India was pointless. The MNC's were used to at least $40 revenue per phone line per month, and that is what they were expecting in India. The IIT decided that it would go for lower-cost/lower-speed solutions using the latest in tech to drive the prices down, instead of increasing the features.

A famous anecdote that one of the Professors there likes to relate - Around the 80's , all the digital phone switches used in India were imported. Companies like Alcatel, Ericsson, etc. used to charge a hefty bundle for them. Then C-DoT (Center for Development of Telecom) stepped in and made their own digital switch for a fraction of the cost. Almost overnight, the MNC's were forced to drop their prices in order to compete. This is what Banyan Networks, and a host of other small startups, incubated at IIT, want to do in India.

You can�t compare prices...

[Karpe]

...from India and from the US.
I pay about R$ 75/month for a 256/128k DSL in Brazil. That is around US$23. Cheap? Well, no, the minimum wage here is R$240 (US$75).

Re:You can�t compare prices...

[cesarcardoso]

Damn f*ing Telemar, I'm paying too much for DSL!

Anyway, Karpe, is your DSL new or old? Telcos hiked their prices recently, at least Telefonica and Telemar did :(

Re:You can�t compare prices...

[Karpe]

Brasil Telecom: 59,90 + BR Turbo (14,90). Since may/02. You can get cheaper prices now, but I think they are for slower speeds.

Re:You can�t compare prices...

[cesarcardoso]

I've seen on BrasilTelecom's site that the price now hiked to 69,90. All hail inflation! :-)

YOURS sounds shitty

[Anonymous Coward]

Dude your Cable is what sounds shitty... 1) cable is a shared line, so unless your the only one in town with cable your NOT getting 640k. 2) You may think that you ONLY are paying $50/month but if you have a combo package your cable company is getting more out of you somewhere you dont know about.
Is it just me or did this guys smart-ass attitude get under your skin?

hmm

[chenry007]

Is it just or or does this sound like a 2 channel ISDN line.

That's a deal?

[BHearsum]

I get 1.5mbps/320bkit for $39.95 CDN (that's $27.49 USD) plus taxes. I can run servers, have the same IP unless my MAC changes, and have no transfer limits....

Think before you speak

[subzero_ice]

I see people who don't know anything about the earning of an average Indian complain how the broadband service being offered is expensive. Firstly let me clarify one thing and that is that the salary of an average Indian in higher than that know to people because people have lot of Black money which they don't disclose inorder to not get taxed.

Secondly I don't know how many of you realise that this a new venture in India and whenever a company starts a new venture the prices are higher that the cost price. Also just so that you know it wasn't until a few years ago that Broadband was made available to the public and it didn't start from $50 a month for 1.5mb connection.

And the this is for the dude who was supporting the telephone companies in US that my contribution of $50 bucks a month is like a drop in a bucket of water but just so that you know with any demand there won't be any production and since you are in business I should also tell you that you should treat your customers equally regardless of the fact that one deals in millions with you and the other deals in only a few hundered dollars. That is the mantra for a successful business.

Equipment by Banyan

[Anonymous Coward]

Okay..im having flashbacks now after seeing Banyan.

Their Equipment has sucked ass in the past and been troublesome to keep up.

They also make a networking product called Banyan Vines, which im suprised is even still around.

Old technology that does not work worth a damn.

For those who dont know anything about india..

[Anonymous Coward]

This service is definitely not for every household, but its the first one in the right direction. India has poor telecom infrastructure when compared to the west, but this is rapidly changing. If you guys ever wonder why companies like AT&T, nokia and ericcson have not gone belly up after the telecom bust, it is because of the vast amounts of investments made in india and good returns they are getting from there. Dialup is very popular in india, for most part due to the absence of anything better. Most of the people use public internet places and few people, mostly upper middle class families, with highschool-college goers have them. There is cable internet available too, but its sucky as well. There are two reasons for the state of affairs - lack of capital to provision the internet access and the lesser spending power per family there.
The lack of capital has an interesting reason behind it - indian currency (rupees) is 47 times weaker than the US dollar and most of the equipment that goes into the ISP provisioning comes from the US or japan and is very costly when u multiply it by 47. If india starts to make its own hubs, routers, firewalls and optical cable comm. stuff, I am sure many things will improve there with respect to data communication.
There was a time when internet meant just email in India. Now its better than that - but ecommerce and downloading tons of p0r*n has to catch there.

Re:First reaction was "Great!" until I asked mysel

[raj2569]

Your dad was a president? your a president, and your kids, and your kids kids.

you cant do anything about it.

Re:First reaction was "Great!" until I asked mysel

[glesga_kiss]

Are you saying they are houseless but all live together?

Yes, they are homeless and live together in sheltered places. Under bridges etc, drive 3km from any major city centre and you'll see it. The USA has millions below the poverty line (not singling anyone out, just don't have figures for elsewhere).

Perhaps communities is a poor choice of words on my part, another example of our make-myself-feel-good doublethink, along with the irrelevant once-per-year canned food drives we have for them.

I would also question how many of these people live like this by choice.

None. They would rather live somewhere, but can't. They are the kids thrown out of their homes by their parents, or left in other unpleasant circumstances. Perhaps they have too much pride to return home and eat humble pie. Perhaps they don't have anyone to turn to at all.

Agreed on the the mental/drug problems, that is one of the main factors, however not always the cause of their situation. Many get hooked on drugs because of the availability of them, and the pressures of that kind of life.

I think you also don't really understand what a caste system is.

I do, but in honesty I was probably being a bit flipant earlier. In a true caste system, you can't move. I'm sure modern ones "that don't exist officially" do allow for some movement, just like our society does.

People do move from poverty into at least middle class occasionally and they are more than just a token few.

I'd disagree with that. Lower-class might make the move, but generally not poverty stricken people. To live in poverty, you are really poor and you wouldn't even be able to afford the bus to your place of education. Plus, in those communities, very little emphasis is placed on education, as it's not a priority. Eating is.

It is based on the Hindu belief of stages in life.

I wonder what caste the originators of the system had? Probably saw themselves as god-like, how conveinient!!

that just

[gol64738]

beats the record. here is Saint Petersburg, Russia, it costs me $200 startup, and $39 a month for DSL and that's with a 300MB limit. get this: 8 cents per MB after 300.
oh, and for shits and grins, there's no such thing as flat rate dialup, either.

hey, anyone wanna help me start up an ISP over here??

Any ISP...

[metlin]

...that runs a site that can stand being Slashdotted must be good enough ;-)

Haha! I love middle management...

[siskbc]

I think what we need to do here in the U.S. to boost productivity is to use the 'virtually no contact with management' model by out sourcing managerial positions instead of technical positions.

I think you may be on to something! American middle management is the problem. Execute the middle-managers and the bureaucrats, and watch the economy soar!

If I might share a quote:

"I can't stand this proliferation of paperwork. It's useless to fight the forms. You've got to kill the people producing them."

--Vladimir Kabaidze, general director of the Ivanivo Machine Building Works, in a speech to the Communist Party Conference

I couldn't say it any better....and I'd say it applies to middle managers just as well as bureaucrats.

Not all that cheap.

[Anonymous Coward]

India's purchasing power parity is approximately 7% compared to the US. That would make this line cost around $200 a month for the average Indian.

Indian ISPs are deceptive.

[Anonymous Coward]

well, Iamin India right now. A note about service providers in India. They dont deliver whatever they claim to be the max speeds. One would be lucky to just manage 12 kbps on a decent connection. So downloading ISOs etc are out of the question most the time. This brings us the option of getting teh CDs off teh grey markets, and they keep proffering cheap windows CDs anyway.

Second, I ve seen DSL (www.dishnetdsl.com. What can one say about a dsl service whose packets take close to 1500 ms to reach the first router/dslam on its network?

Third, download caps allow you only around 500-700 mb per month, after which the per MB prices make you go broke.Dial up isnt bettwe either, and it costs about 45 rupees an hour with breaks and line noise, and faulty billing. I Am not cribbing, but this is the true state of things out here.

but yes, if you are rich enough you can by pass all these stingy, crooked ISP batards and get true access, but again, a decent leased line costs about 7,00,000 to 17,00,000 a year.that much money is about 12-14 years of my savings...no option.

meanwhile i hope that my connections hold until i click submit on this comment form.

Meanwhile i canunderstand why the traffic cap is so low. Their service speeds wont probably allow you do that in a month anyway. ;-)

128k is NOT broadband

[shdragon]

I thought it was alredy established that 128k is not broadband.

Soo, /. moves from dupes to contradicting stories? ;)

True, but not so simple...

[siskbc]

I'm not advocating oppression of any people. I just want people to know that quality is not the only reason for outsourcing.

I appreciate that, but even then, all it's doing is spreading out a certain number of jobs throughout a diluted working pool. As this happens, India's standard of living is increasing quite quickly. And, I guarantee you, the parent poster is just as unhappy about people from third-world nations working in this country too (don't know if you were around for the H-1B visa flame war or not about a month ago...).

And ultimately, there are disadvantages to shipping projects overseas. There is less contact among work teams, and, for a variety of reasons, the quality ends up pretty shoddy. Much of this, I'm sure, is because so many of the talented coders from other countries come *here* to work.

Finally, there are so many advantages, for an employer, to having their intellectual capital in this country, that it should be easy for Americans to outcompete. I've never heard of a company sending the development of mission-critical stuff overseas. It's generally the mundane stuff.

So my point is basically, if someone can't do better than the crap coming back from from foreign outsourcing, I won't cry for them.

Re:First reaction was "Great!" until I asked mysel

[bheer]

Yawn. ACs are not worth replying to, but still.

Go see allegedly high-born castes ("Brahmins") pull rickshaws (human-powered carts) in Patna.

Go see Rajasthani Meenas (a "low-born" caste, under-developed until a few decades ago) get into the India's Civil Service and get cushy jobs in ever increasing numbers (affirmative action has helped somewhat here).

Look at the politics and bureaucracy of almost any South Indian state (especially Tamil Nadu) and see how Brahmins have practically been eliminated from both these spheres.

Look at how powerful the so-called lower-castes and tribals are in the north, in UP, Bihar, Jharkhand and Madhya Pradesh.

Sure, caste isn't finished in India (it has had 2500 years to flourish here, after all) but things are a lot better now for 'low-born' Indians today. And that is a Good Thing(tm).

Today, how successful you are is usually decided by how well educated you are. And that's the way things should be. And thanks to affirmative action, there are *lots* of "low-born" Indians who get excellent education, 'reserved' seats in the best colleges and free/highly subsidized education, even in college and grad school.

Your in Russia

[Anonymous Coward]

THe problem with places like Russia and india is a crap infrastructure. And until there is an absolutely huge demand, you will not see competition or investment in infrastructure from companies. In the us we kind of have that problem but most Americans spend enough to suport corporate investment. Honestly in most countries power, phone, water, and gas utilities should be government run. Where I live in the US we have a terrible power distribution system, the equipement is from the 1930's, we cannot get reliable voltages out of our lines, it destroys sensitive electronics. We have everything on UPS and still computers, dvd players, electronics last 2 years max. This is only 20mi from NYC but we are sparsly populated and our power costs are high.

You can say that about AMERICAN workers

[siskbc]

Sorry, but I have personally seen a number of indian workers in positions at Cisco which they were not in any way talented enough to fill, to the point where other (more capable) engineers had to hold their hand to make sure they didn't do more harm than good.

Can you honestly say that there aren't Caucasian, American workers about whom you can say the same? That's just called hiring. Sometimes it goes well, sometimes not. I have some coworkers who are so damned dumb I don't know how they remember to breathe. They happen to be white. It's not fair to hold foreign workers to a higher standard than domestic.

Re:You can say that about AMERICAN workers

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not fair to hold foreign workers to a higher standard than domestic.
Now that explains the H1-B program. They are "here" because there are no qualified american workers.

If there are no qualified dumbasses in america then we are forced by law to import some?

Re:You can say that about AMERICAN workers

[drinkypoo]

I just don't think that it's necessary to import people on visa if they're not superior employees. I'm sorry, I didn't specify the visa holding aspect, that is definitely my bad.

how much is ISDN in India?

[Anonymous Coward]

I was wondering how much cheaper than ISDN is this? I'm not really sure I see the advantage over ADSL, its slower and drops the data rate when a voice call is made. Or is the equipment dramatically cheaper or something.

iDSL?

[psyconaut]

This sounds awfully like the pseudo-standard iDSL that Ascend used to hawk...

-psy

Re:iDSL?

[Gray]

For the record, IDSL type things was also anounced by Cisco and another much smaller company I used to work for called Fitel-Photomatrix.

We made a box that split a PRI into a bunch of simulated ISDN connections. Cisco at least said they where going to offer it on a card, not sure if they did. This was back in the days when ADSL was still very wierd stuff and 56k modems didn't exist.

It's very strange seeing it now being used in India. Fitel-Photomatrix got bought out and vanished in the tech boom, but ironically their boxes would seem fairly ideal for these folks.

Cheap?

[Anonymous Coward]

Where i live i can get Cable internet for 24.95(Canadian $) a month with the modem. 2 gigs total traffic a month.

some facts about india

[Anonymous Coward]

India is the fourth largest economy in the world.

TOI: ''India world's fourth largest economy: Report''

Yet India is ranked 162 in actual per capita income.

WDI: http://www.worldbank.org/data/wdi2003/tables/table 1-1.pdf

I believe if you use the Power law of distribution: 80% of the Wealth in India resides in the hand of 20% of Indians. These 20% are 200 Million strong and pretty rich.
-N

Re:First reaction was "Great!" until I asked mysel

[grumpygrodyguy]

This post may be offtopic, but it's absolutely correct.

Some points on 3rd world broadband...

[cesarcardoso]

Here in Brazil, I got 256/128 DSL from my telco (Telemar) for $33.86 (DSL cost from telco, modem loan and ISP's fee - yes, we have to pay a ISP here in Brazil only to authenticate us, damn Anatel); the price I have is here from Rio, but can be easily used in all Brazilian regions with DSL.
(All those prices were calculated using US$1=R$3.2)

Cheap for the US standards, maybe, I really don't know is anybody in the US is still offering 256/128. SO expensive for Brazilian ones! Brazilians earn roughly 10% or less of the American paycheck.

Yes, the DIAS is expensive. It can be cool and such, but it's expensive - especially in a country where people earn even less than Brazil.

This is a good deal

[Anonymous Coward]

When you consider the costs to use VSNL, and the cost of local phone calls (which are metered), this is a very good deal.

Indian programmers make a lot more then you think.

Posting your site on Slashdot?

[McCrapDeluxe]

Say goodbye to those 300 megs ;)

What the...?

[IWannaBeAnAC]

You mean Hemos actually read the white paper? What the fuck is Slashdot coming to???

Whats the average Wage there?

[Anonymous Coward]

Thats almost 1000 rupees - ever been to India? You know how much the average person earns?

Another idea which will not benefit most - maybe only the rich. But the rich already have cable and stuff ( at least my friend there does )

Anybody saw the City of Joy (about Calcutta)? I have visited there.

I doubt even 1% of the population there can afford this.

Re:First reaction was "Great!" until I asked mysel

[outsider007]

The fun thing about castes is, you cant do anything about it. Your mom was a toilet scrubber? Your a toilet scrubber, and your kids, and your kids kids.

same in the US. that's why we have lottery tickets. and beer.

Re:First reaction was "Great!" until I asked mysel

[Anonymous Coward]

No, actually, that's like me paying $2500 a month for ISDN. I pay $50/mo and get around 2mbps downstream with 128k cap up. I would NEVER be able to afford it at these prices. It would cost more than my rent.

What?

[Anonymous Coward]

How come people in a 3rd world country can get broadband but I live in the US and can't!

Re:First reaction was "Great!" until I asked mysel

[raju1kabir]

Indian Average Household Income - $2,847
Indian Median Household Income - $1,005

The reason for the huge difference is due to the huge gap between the poor and the wealthy in India. In the US the average is $49K and the median is $42K which is a much smaller gap.

Nope, it's a $7000 gap! The gap in India is only $1800.

Okay, just kidding, I have no complaints with your reasoning.

It is not important about money...

[Anonymous Coward]

The fact that this news even made to slashdot means the broadband revolution is brewing in India. The problem with India is the poor customer service and no recognition to the concept of a "customer". Unless that changes, companies are going to suffer and people wil be frustrated. Otherwise nothing to stop the India.
Yes, I am an Indian settled in the US of A

Re:Population

[Anonymous Coward]

"about 21% of Americans are under 14"

Fantastic. How many of those are girls?

Third world skills = third world wages...

[aquarian]

...wherever you happen to be, whether that's Bombay or San Jose. And, as far as I'm concerned, this is fair and just. If you don't think so, where did you get your sense of entitlement? Does being born in the US make you more entitled to a middle class or better living, than someone from somewhere else with greater skills, intelligence, and willingness to work?

Re:Third world skills = third world wages...

[grumpygrodyguy]

Does being born in the US make you more entitled to a middle class or better living, than someone from somewhere else with greater skills, intelligence, and willingness to work?

Almost every american generation since 1776 has seen its stardard of living improve. If you're asking me if college educated americans working 50-60hr weeks for a crappy studio apt and barely enough money to survive, when in 1970 a house painter could own his own 3 bedroom home is upsetting? Yes that is very upsetting.

And you H1b folks aren't the only ones who are contributing to this. The mexican workers here all live communally so they can afford to charge what they do. All the rich white republican assholes who hire them are just fine with that because they don't believe human beings deserve basic neccesities like Health Care, or families, or cars, or privacy. H1bs are similar in that they are indentured slaves.

You justify what you earn as being meritous, in that you are "better" than those of us you replace. But in fact you are morally inferior. When you start lobbying for standardized health care, and unionized labor forces...then maybe you'll convince me you're better human beings than we are. Until then you're just arrogant, self-righteous, and morally barkrupt people here to chase after greed just like the white masters who brought you here.

The american dream is supposed to be about improving the standard of living for everyone. What's happening now is some young, cheap 70hr a week kid is doing the job of 3 people. If 2 or 3 americans standard's of living are lowered to provide you the american dream, then who is selfish and arrogant?

I'd say most of you H1B workers have landed in the wrong part of the century, 1930s germany would be more your style.

over-hyped service

[romit_icarus]

I'm in Bombay, India, and I get more than that for 800 rupees a month. So what's the big deal?

Looks like proposed BT MidBand service in UK.

[vyzar]

Hmm...what the paper describes is exactly what BT in the UK are proposing as a "MidBand" service (as opposed to Broadband). Even the pricing seems similar!

Essentially it is just ISDN actualy using the bells and whistles it has always had, but has never used!

That's not cheap

[billtom]

For another data point, I'm paying $20 (CAN$30) for 1Mbit/s service (Toronto, Canada). So $16.50 for 128kbit/s sounds pretty damn expensive.

Re:That's not cheap

[t-maxx cowboy]

Does your $30 Cnd include phone service?

The dollar sign

[Anonymous Coward]

$ is not a US symbol, it's actually Spanish, which is why Mexico and other Latin countries use it.

http://www.alt-usage-english.org/excerpts/fxorig in .html

The word "dollar" is from Dutch, and it was used to refer to the Spanish coins in the New World before the US had its own currency.

http://www.askoxford.com/asktheexperts/faq/about sy mbols/dollarsign

Last Post!

[alpg]

The Man Who Almost Invented The Vacuum Cleaner
The man officially credited with inventing the vacuum cleaner is
Hubert Cecil Booth. However, he got the idea from a man who almost
invented it.
In 1901 Booth visited a London music-hall. On the bill was an
American inventor with his wonder machine for removing dust from carpets.
The machine comprised a box about one foot square with a bag on top.
After watching the act -- which made everyone in the front six rows sneeze
-- Booth went round to the inventor's dressing room.
"It should suck not blow," said Booth, coming straight to the
point. "Suck?", exclaimed the enraged inventor. "Your machine just moves
the dust around the room," Booth informed him. "Suck? Suck? Sucking is
not possible," was the inventor's reply and he stormed out. Booth proved
that it was by the simple expedient of kneeling down, pursing his lips and
sucking the back of an armchair. "I almost choked," he said afterwards.
-- Stephen Pile, "The Book of Heroic Failures"

- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...