Having access to the Internet nowadays ranks right up there beside the basic human needs. Some countries are even proposing laws to make this happen. However, optimism about the Internet and its potential has got clouded with the obstacles and unfriendly tactics adopted by Internet Service Providers (ISP). The situation is no different in India, with a multitude of ISPs present in the country’s market and a lot of broadband plans on offer from them. So you do have at least an illusion of choice, but they all come with their down-sides. We help you separate the grain from the chaff and help you choose the ISP and plan that suit your purpose.
First off, this story is for those who are looking for broadband Internet connections, for use at home. Thus only residential consumer plans will be considered, by ISPs who operate across India. Since wired connections (whether are the more affordable ones, we shall look at these first. The providers with a fairly wide pan-Indian reach are BSNL, Airtel, Hathway, Sify, Reliance, and Tata Indicom. Some ISPs operate in just a few areas – MTNL TriBand and Iqara to give just two examples, and don’t have as much geographical reach.
Use-case 1: Basic home-use
If your Internet usage is light and you hardly get the time to use your desktop/laptop at home, paying as less as possible is a prime consideration. Checking mails, instant messaging (chatting with text), saving family photo albums, watching the occasional YouTube video, and researching information for school/work are simple tasks. Getting over with them fast is an added bonus, if you can get a fast connection. Provided you judiciously use your Internet connection, data caps work out alright and you do not need an unlimited plan for this kind of usage scenario. You’d have to be looking at paying about Rupees 250 per month.
Good plans are offered by BSNL and Hathway at this price-point. Expect a data cap of 1GB (per month), and speeds up to 2 Mbps.
Use-case 2: Advanced user
If you spend plenty of time on the Internet at home daily, the “data caps” imposed on lower-priced broadband plans can be a problem. Paying for the extra number of MegaBytes used each month can be hard on the wallet. You’d rather settle for a slower connection, and be certain about the amount that goes towards paying for your Internet connection. In addition to the basic Internet usage pattern outlined above, viewing a lot of YouTube videos, listening to music over Internet radio, gaming online in multi-player games, browsing heavy web-pages a lot, downloading free software/music/movies, and having multiple computers in the house, are all tasks that could gobble many GigaBytes worth of data transfer like there is no tomorrow. Here you’d have to raise your outgo upon an Internet connection, to around Rupees 1,000 per month.
Good plans are offered in this price bracket by Airtel and BSNL. Both offer unlimited data transfer, and a range of speeds. At the moment, the best broadband plan would have to be the one offered by BSNL – a 512 kbps unlimited pre-paid connection for Rs. 7,500 a year – adding taxes and modem rental charge and averaging it out across the year brings the price to an average of Rs. 750 a month.
Enthusiasts, who used to gravitate towards Airtel, now have to contend with their “Fair Usage Policy” data transfer limits. As outlined in a PCW news story, even after paying more than double the monthly price (Rs. 1,799) and getting a 4 Mbps broadband connection, a downloader on Airtel would actually have downloaded the same amount of data as a person on the BSNL plan, because the Airtel connection would drop to 256 kbps speed after 50GB of data transfer. But then, Airtel has the advantage of connection speed and quality of support, over BSNL which moves slower to fix connection issues.
Use-case 3: Broadband on the move
When everything cuts the cable and goes wireless, why not high-speed broadband? Despite wired connections being priced lower, wireless offers the convenience of staying connected wherever you go, even national roaming. The operators who offer this facility are all mobile service providers – BSNL EV-DO, Tata Photon Plus, Reliance NetConnect, MTS Mblaze and Idea Net Setter. All of these claim speeds from 2 Mbps to 3.1 Mbps (using 3G technologies), but their wireless nature makes them susceptible to large speed variations depending on time and place. So you might experience 4 Mbps speed one moment, just 256 kbps a few minutes later, and then go back to a higher speed after a while.
Just like wired broadband plans, the wireless ones vary widely in their pricing and intended audience. The lowest priced ones are around Rs. 150 for less than 100 MB worth of data transfer per month, and then you have to pay one rupee or more per MB you transfer (includes upload and download). The higher-priced plans around Rs. 1,000 are sold with a label of being “unlimited” but still have a data usage cap of between 10-15 GB.
However, BSNL has a plan priced at Rs. 750 per month, whereby data transfer is unlimited without any further riders of data usage caps, at least for now. It is even nicer to know that BSNL has most Indian cities covered with their “EV-DO” service, so you’ll get fairly acceptable speeds across the country. So what is the downside? The “EV-DO” speeds are a bit lower than what you can get with other mobile high-speed broadband ISPs, and P2P services such as BitTorrent may not transfer data at as high a speed as normal browsing.
Now that you know which plans offer the best value-for-money in their respective usage scenarios on a country-wide scale, we hope it will help you choose the broadband plan most suitable for your requirements. Even if you do not want to pick the specific providers mentioned here, you have at least found out what to expect at different price points and set your expectations accordingly. If there is one thing we noticed in the field of broadband, it is that five years after the regulator (TRAI) defined broadband as being 256 kbps, Internet speeds classed at or above 1 Mbps have started becoming much more accessible and common. Despite this unfortunately, a lot of plans that claim Mbps speeds still drop you down to Kbps speeds, each in their own way and with their own excuse.
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