Hi Tech in India

When we decided to bring the laptop to India one of the questions in my mind was the feasibility of getting an Internet connection at our house. The “deluxe, all modern” houses in the Bangalore of Thomas Friedan include high speed Internet, but we were going to live in small town. I am finding that India in 2006 is sometimes very modern yet in other ways still very traditional. Getting our Internet service hooked up is a good example.

In the high tech India of 2006, even Varkala has posters advertising “unlimited broadband, starting at Rs 399 (about $11) per month” but actually getting connected was not that easy. There are no phone lines in our neighbourhood, but one house has cable TV so the landlord suggested we should look into a cable connection. At the Asianet Cable office in town a pleasant woman in a gorgeous sari explained what “schemes” were available. After a lengthy interchange in very broken English she recommended the “Mach 4” scheme, which included a free modem for the Onam special, and 9 GB of use for about $140, which is a fortune in India, but a bit less than 3 months of high speed in Lennoxville. “When can this connection be installed?” I asked, and almost fell off my seat when she said “tomorrow”. I was then given a pen and a long application form, the only part of which I could complete was my name. As for the address, our house is down a dirt track, near an intersection that some rickshaw drivers seem to have never heard of. Luckily I had our landlord’s cell number, and he explained the address. The clerk accepted my very empty application form with a typical “No problem”.

The next day, as promised, the Asianet crew arrived in a cute 3 wheeled vehicle, but after exploring the area, the foreman announced that they did not have enough wire to connect to the nearest pole, and besides, it was on private property. I went back to the landlord, who assured me that the wire would travel on his aunt’s land and she would not object, and then tried to communicate this to my friends at Asianet. Almost a week of daily phone calls to Asianet later, and listening to excuses about the rain and technical difficulties I was beginning to despair, but Ann said to persist, so one day we called four times and the crew finally showed.

To install a cable is a very low tech operation that requires a team of 5 men: the hardest worker was the guy in his bare feet who climbed the coconut trees they used as poles to string the 200 m or more of wire, another man cut piece of wire and threw them to the man in the tree to use as ties, another attached the cable plug and connected to the box back at the pole, the fourth man took the money and made out a receipt, and the boss spoke English and supervised. The operation took two hours, and we were on-line. The crew did not have a drill, so they fed the wire through an open window! But that’s OK because it’s so hot we never close the windows!

The connection is pretty good, when it is working, and although advertised as 1 Mbps it’s rarely faster than 40 Kbps. Unfortunately, high tech revolution doesn’t include electricity, so we are down when the power is out, which it is every day for at least a few hours. Still it’s way more convenient than going to an Internet café, and so we are able to work on our blog, and the flickr site, and most importantly, for the kids to make use of the abundance of material available on the Internet for school work.
We are the only household in the neighbourhood with the Internet and although the 12 year old girl next door says they have a computer at school, I doubt if she has ever used it as she is fascinated to watch Kathleen use ours, and too afraid to touch it.

Addendum: Minutes after posting this entry our Internet connection went down, but this time it took TWELVE days of phone calls to get re-connected!! The folks at Asianet promise that all problems have been repaired and that we will have good service. Makes me think how much I appreciate Luc Grandchamp and the efficient tech crew at ETSB.