On Tuesday 15 March 2005 15:07, Sujeet Bhatt wrote:

Since this is already marked OT, I can't resist the temptation of adding my two bits. The idea of "filling up a form and submitting it at the CO" and waiting till "end of March" for the connection is so hopelessly reminiscent of the licence raj that my head swims in disbelief and despair. Add to this the clueless linesmen and even more clueless front office staff, not to mention the globally discredited revenue model of charging per megabyte, and the picture of an anachronistic Kafkaesque nightmare is complete. When will these guys ever grow up?

and if u thought that this was only MTNL just try orange or reliance. Current wireless technology is almost ready to replace the "centralised telco" model of communications except for the fact that our sicko politicians want an official slice of every rupee u manage to create and hence create laws to cartelise services. So the guy who routes international calls via broadband onto the local phone line is arrested and charged with criminal laws. But a reliance gets a wrap and scolding for doing precisely the same thing. Wifi phones and open standards permit good communications upto 2.5 km. One link i tested worked from Bandra to dahisar. The cost of one "cell" covering a radius of one km. with 20mbps effective throughput will work out to about Rs.1.5 lac. Each cell can support about a 1000 connections using speex. The effective cost of communications is so low that the service is essentially free. Every cyber cafe can become a telco cell and communications will spread rapidly. But then we are in India (not that other countries are any better but i dont see why we should be setting shitty standards for ourselves) and still trying to hatao garibi full 57 yrs after we replaced the colonial oppressors with an altogether more effective, upgraded purely indegenous version.

rgds jtd