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Rangachari Anand

June 11 2004

When I visited Hyderabad in 2003, my father-in-law told me that cable Internet was available in his apartment building in Srinagar Colony, a neighborhood on the northwestern side of the city. Now, cable TV has become very popular all over India but I was a little surprised to hear about cable access to the Internet since I know how expensive the infrastructure is. Even in my town in New Jersey, close to New York City, we finally received cable Internet only in 2003. What I actually encountered in Hyderabad was not quite what I expected...

<>    On my first morning in Hyderabad, When I took a look outside from my in-law's apartment, I saw thick bundles of wires strung on the utility poles. See the picture above (click on image to see a larger version). I did not give this much thought until the crew from the "cable" operator came to install the connection later that day.
    To my surprise, they hauled in a cable from the bundle that you see above - at which time I discovered that the cables were all UTP. They were using Ethernet! So this is what is meant by cable Internet in Hyderabad!
    One of the installers attached a RJ-45 jack to the cable and plugged it into my father-in-law's PC. He then manually entered the IP parameters. I asked him why they weren't using DHCP. He looked puzzled did not appear to know what DHCP was. I explained how DHCP works and pointed out that it might save him a little work - this came as a revelation to him.
    After some more investigation, I found that this ISP had purchased a 128K ISDN line that he was reselling to his customers. I was never able to get download speeds of much more than 3 KBytes/sec - no better than dial-up. Not too surprising since at least 20 customers were sharing the ISDN line! Obviously, due to Ethernet distance restrictions this ISP was only able to serve a couple of buildings.
    There are many such ISPs all over the city (see photo below - click on picture for a larger image) and they all have no qualms about stringing their cables wherever they choose. They simply don't bother asking for permissions. I'm sure more than a few palms have been greased to have authorities look the other way. Cut cables are a frequent problem. Rival ISPs sometimes employ saboteurs to cut each others cables. I am sure that this will be brought under control soon but until then, it promises to be highly entertaining!