Hello folks,
I was in Mumbai recently and thought of getting an additional internet connection to have better redundancy. For all those who are MTNL's religious followers, I decided to minimize the use of their connection primarily because of their lack of support ( 2 months of horror ) and ADSL is extremely sensitive to noise. MTNL's plans are also pretty costly as compared to Reliance's. Reliance provides connectivity through cat5e fiber in my area ( Andheri West ). They also provide ADSL connections but only in certain areas.
I did have a Reliance connection but I disconnected it primarily due to the haphazard nature of their service and lack of reliability. But now they have professionalized their customer support ( atleast yelling at times yields extremely good results ). They have also improved the reliability of their network - they have battery backups and all :P Previously they relied on the horrible WAN setup by BSES powersurfer.
Coming to the technical aspect of this thread, they have a really annoying login system ( which is a big security threat as well ). They basically rely on their DNS servers to authenticate the user. For example, if I'm not logged in and I type google.com, their DNS server returns an internal IP ( 10.x.x.x ) and they issue a 302 redirect so the browser is redirected to a login page. This is where you enter your credentials and you get logged in. This is a very annoying method of logging in the user but now-a-days many ISPs prefer it! On Linux you have the option of using a script called AutoLogin to keep you logged in 24x7.
Heres the gotcha! This connection wouldn't work when I connected it to the WAN port of my wireless router ( Netgear WGR614v5 ). The problem was / is that when my router gets the IP and DNS information from the DHCP server, it ends up with 4 DNS servers but it remembers only 2 =P The first two are vanilla DNS servers while the last two take care of redirecting and logging in the user. So the router was querying the vanilla DNS servers and it never redirected me to the login page.
They also have MAC address binding in place =P