Sudeep D'Souza

Of late I have seen a lot of third party providers of Reliance Wimax connections in Hyderabad posting their phone number on my blog entry Going WiMax . The wimax connection really did not work out for me for the following reasons It just took a lot of time to get a connection each time I wanted one. It would sit for ages in trying to acquire network address. The speed was decent but nothing like the 2 mbps link that Airtel currently gives me. It was not really reliable. It would get cut of for no reason what-so-ever. On the whole my experience has not been good at all with the wi-max connection and had it disconnected. I now use Airtel which is completely underground in my area and the service that they offer is quite exceptional. Speed is good and I have not experienced any downtime in the last 1 month that I have been using it.

We applied more than a month and a half ago for a WiMax internet connection from Reliance and it finally got installed on Saturday. The technician arrived with all his equipment which consisted of a square dish, a small modem and a whole load of wire. They walked around the roof for about 10 min with the dish connected to the laptop and were able to identify the best location to place the dish from where they were able to get the optimum signal. Once they had the dish setup they took about an hour and half to get the connection setup and then finally after about 3 hours they had the WiMax working. It has been working pretty well ever since it has been installed. Currently I have a 150 Kbps unlimited connection that gets a new IP each time I connect. I need to now change that to a new option where they provide a wireless router so that I can really blog from anywhere in my house.

After 4 years of struggling with wired broadband connections and 2 providers later we have decided to try out a wimax connection. The wimax provider is Reliance. To read more about how we came about this decision you can read more about it on my wife's blog My tryst with ISPs in Hyderabad . Wimax as defined by wikipedia is "...a standards-based technology enabling the delivery of last mile wireless broadband access as an alternative to cable and DSL." So essentially they are going to put a receiver on top of my house which will help me connect onto the Internet by connecting wirelessly to the Reliance tower. Sounds like a dream in our wire infested cities . This is a rather new technology but it is said to provide high bandwidth at a lower cost in the long run. Currently Reliance is offering it but soon Tata Indicom (first quarter of 2009) and BSNL are also going to offer it. Given below is the chronological account of my Going wiMax experience Day 1 (Jan 28, 2008) The s...

A few days ago I was in a wonderful mood to blog and my internet connection went down - so I called up the call center. After all the introductions where I gave them my subscriber Id and told them the status of all the lights on my router and unplugging and replugging and twisting and turning that they demanded I do and the thing still didn't work I was told that an executive will visit my house. So I asked them when the executive would come and they tell me in 3 days. That had my blood boiling. A great deal of screaming and shouting had no effect - they told me point blank that their process will take 3 days and just as i was about to slam the phone down they say " Thank you for calling. Have a nice day " and that had me furious. How can they expect me to have a nice day - they just messed it up for me even more by telling me I won't have an internet connection for 3 days. The question I have is, do these guys thing ? Why do they not put themselves in the shoes of th...