Wireless broadband options in India

I am looking around for broadband services for my folks in Bangalore. They already have DSL via the state-owned BSNL. But this service is quite unreliable, being disconnected for days at a stretch. Before you draw conclusions about the India and her spotty infrastructure, be aware that this DSL broadband comes for about 5 Euros per month. That is 5 times lesser than comparable DSL in Germany. My way of looking at this is that part of the service offering (the reliability) is traded for the lower costs in India. Off course PPP (purchase power parity) will put 5 Euros in India right around 20 Euros in Berlin, but still, 5 Euros a month is a good deal - after all, people who buy broadband in India are very well off.

So we decided to shop around for cellular broadband services. The reasoning is that if you have a couple of services then at least one should be active at any time. The options are

1. Airtel (USB stick, 3G). Officially works at 115 kbps d/l, actually works at 15-20 kbps according to the salesperson, and costs 10 Euros a month for unlimited service.

2. Reliance (Antenna and coax cable, 3G). Apparently delivers upto 300 kbps, and costs 12 Euros a month for unlimited service. Requires installing an antenna on the rooftop.

I would go with option 2 for home use and option 1 for mobility. My folks have a better idea - just revert to dial-up when the DSL breaks because thats good enough for their need for checking email once a day. Cant argue with that!

Pure gold statistics about the Internet

Figure: Internet users by age (Click to enlarge). Reproduced from here

I found an absolutely remarkable report issued by the OECD in the summer of 2008. It has got lots of goodies on OECD Internet usage. Here is the URL

The future of the Internet Economy, a Statistical profile

One graph in the report that was very interesting and it is pasted above. The graph shows OECD countries' Internet usage conditioned on the age-group. It is clear that younger people use the Internet much more than older people.

Now as time progresses the young people will age, and I do not think the young people of today will give up on the Internet as they age. Meanwhile the next generations will be even more Internet savvy than today's youngsters. So the low down is that the next 15-20 years will see a high growth period for OECD Internet broadband demand. There is about 20-30 more years of growth in this space before Internet broadband growth saturates, say, the way Electricity did.