Review updated as of October 4th , 2007.
I am a cable internet user from Trivandrum in Kerala.
Asianet Dataline is the cable internet service made available by Asianet Satellite Communications, a big player in the Cable TV business with proprietary channels which are aired in many countries.
When this group made announcements about cable internet services way back in 1993, I was a middle school student not into the technical field at all. I hadn't used the Internet before and was new to this.
But in reality, their cable internet service was rolled out only in mid 2000.
New Broadband Plans
After the unveiling of Broadband Policy 2004, Asianet has come up with new ''broadband'' plans. They boast of 256 kbps to 1 mbps speeds, but have crappy download limits ranging from as low as 50 MB for 50Rs/month to around 35GB for 7500 Rs/month.
High speed connections with download limits are equivalent to owning a Ferrari and having to drive it on village roads.......
When I got this connection in the year 2002, the cost of the cable modem came to about 5000 Rs and I had to initially pay 3 months of rent as post dated cheques. The installation charges came to around 800 Rs.
Right now, the cable modem is only 1000 rs and the installation charges were around 1000Rs are not mentioned anymore on their website.
Asianet also offers cable modem rental @ Rs 100 /month which is a good offer for students who stay in hostels and people who want to try this ISP.
Home users also get a POP3 mail account with 5 MB of space and SPAM filtering. This ISP also has many web hosting options.
I have now used this ISP for 5 years.......
My current speed is 256 kbits and I am paying 880 Rs + tax every month for it.
Download speeds and connection quality
The download speed depends on the site from which the download is taking place. There is a bandwidth testing feature in the AsianetDataline.com website, which gives over 220 kbits per second speed all the time, but this is not indicative of the download speed when downloading from sites outside India.
While downloading from international sites like Sourceforge.net, the speed continously reduces and settles at around 64 kbits per second, even on my 256 kbits per second connection. This is during peak hours. During off peak hours, the speed reduces and settles at around 128 kbits per second.
If downloads are made using software like Download Accelerator or Flashget or GetRight, then the speed is very good and stays above 220 kbits per second even during peak hours.
Asianet has made maximum effort in order to reduce P2P / File sharing traffic on their network. Most of the file sharing softwares like Kazaa, Ares, etc do not connect to their respective networks.
Download speeds using Bittorrent clients like Utorrent or BitComet are also slow and encyption has to be enabled in order to download using these clients.
Basically, the quality of the connection is not as good as a BSNL connection. This is because of routing issues or increased data traffic.
Because of this, the experience with streaming videos and music is not as good as what a BSNL connection can provide.
Streaming internet radio from sites like https://last.fm can be only with frequent skipping and buffering of tracks.
Another use of the internet is for online gaming. For an immersive gaming experience, the time taken for a internet data packet to travel from the hosting server PC to the client PC and back (also called the "ping time") should be as low as possible.
But the ping time for asianet cable internet connection is poor and there is a lot of data packet loss which considerably degrade the online gaming experience.
Uptime
The uptime of the connection is decent and in the past 2 weeks, there has been only two outages of 1 hour each.
Customer support can be rated as OK or below average. The customer support personnel might not have the technical knowledge to answer queries which can arise from a person who is well versed with the technicalities of the internet, but they do provide answers to most of the basic queries.
Package comparison between Asianet Dataline and BSNL (as of 3rd October 2007)
For a 256 kbits unlimited download connection, BSNL charges 900 Rs / month while Asianet charges 880 Rs / month. Even though Asianet seems to have a minor cost advantage, the increased quality of the BSNL connection makes that extra 20 Rs worthwhile.
Next up is the comparison for the 2 mbps package.
For 475 Rs, Asianet Dataline's Homenet 475 Plan offers a 2 mbits per second connection with a 2500 MB download limit.
BSNL offers a 2 megabits connection for 500 Rs, but BSNL offers unlimited downloads at night from 2 am to 8 am, which decimates Asianet's Homenet 475 plan. :)
Conclusion
Get BSNL if your monthly internet budget is in Rs 500 Range.
Get BSNL 900 Rs unlimited 256 kbps plan if the budget is 900 Rs. :)
But BSNL connection might take a lot of time to get deployed, and sometimes, the local telephone exchange might be saturated and might be not be able to offer any more broadband connections.
In such a case, Homenet 880 is the answer.
In case people are wondering, I have not dumped this ISP even after 5 years because:
The modem cost me 5000 Rs, which was a large investment at that time.
Since my father is a doctor, we enjoy a Doctor's discount scheme which means the cost of Homenet 880 is only 2392 Rs for a 4 month period (Quarterly payment).
