Reliance Broadband: Some details
I have taken a liberty from self-imposed hiatus here to break this news to all. From my insider sources in Reliance, it is reliably learnt that Reliance is stepping up services for Wireline and aims to go big in Broadband. Roughly in about 3 months time.
It all boils down to one thing. To challange the ultimate domination of BSNL in the Wireline space. I was told that BSNL's refusal to open up the last mile access was going nowhere; plus in any case, they would have opened up only those loops, which are 5 years or older ones. Which are practically useless for data applications since they were never designed keeping these factors in mind.
The exact technical details elude me.
Still, it is good news. The roll out would be staggered. Reliance seems to be concentrating on the plum cities as for now. It has already started off it's wireline in Chandigarh and perhaps Ludhiana in Punjab. DSL is not being offered but dial up is available.
A disclaimer here. 3 months is based on their internal projections. If they decide to stagger or put the plans on hold due to unforeseen circumstances, we might have to suffer the BIG question mark again. Reliance Broadband when?
Further, it would be copper connectivity to the last mile, which means that it would be DSL. Since DSL can be scaled up to 25 Mbps, this is more than sufficient for the video applications and gaming at the moment. Of course, 100 Mbps is in a different league altogether. Forget it guys. 100 Mbps is what seems to be a magical figure. It's like looking for a sane soul in BSNL; a needle in a haystack; a mere number for us and much like the elusive missing page in the Government's files......
Reliance is perfectly poised for kicking BSNL right in between where it hurts them most. They would surely undercut the tariffs to scale up.
Meanwhile, Reliance seems to have cut out the idea to loan bandwidth to cable operators and mercifully, it isn't going via Sify's way. Surely, it was their waterloo.
I shall keep you posted as and when something really interesting comes up.
BSNL has not responded so far to any further queries about the unlimited plans pricing. Nor there has been any activity about the CNN-IBN Blog. They are in the process of setting up a CMS with remote login facility; further, they seem to be fine-tuning the idea about having blogs existing with the mainstream media. Therefore, for everything else, you would have to suffer Rajdeep's outbursts for the time being.