Ho John Lee’s Weblog

Tripped over an interesting blog on broadband in India this evening, written by one Dr. Abhishek Puri, who is an actual M.D. finishing up his studies in India. He apparently started writing a few months ago for an Indian site called TechWhack, and just recently set up his own site, which is also published as the TechWhack Broadband Blog, and appears to have started posting weekly reports to Om Malik’s site as well.

There is no shortage of business and trade press coverage of the Indian telecom and broadband market, which has been growing and evolving rapidly. However, there’s some good and entertaining commentary posted here, and the perspective he offers is refreshingly direct at times, especially compared with the Indian business press. Hope he keeps writing for a while in between his day gig doing surgery and orthopedics.

This post outlines some of the same issues for rural telecom and networking services identified along the way during the Kuppam i-Community program in Andhra Pradesh, including the problems with network quality of service, the demand for education services as a driver for network traffic, the value of open source systems, and the need for domestically sourced technology products to bring down the costs.

Another post describes life as a internet customer in India:

I have been a subscriber of BSNL for as long as I can remember. The fact is that I never had any choice. Apart from high access charges (one of the highest in the world for dial up - Is TRAI listening?), the whole thing is bundled with lousy customer support. Admittedly, I have come far from the days when it took ages to connect on to the server wasting my calls in the process. Those days I had to use my connection like a sucker because I was afraid of having huge telephone bills. Repeated complaints to the “customer care centre” brought about no resolution and it was frustrating enough to bear the insults of some dead wit moron sitting at the other end.

One more aspect of Bangalore feeling a bit like a replay of Silicon Valley in the mid-90’s?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 6th, 2005 at 8:58 pm and is filed under The Internet, Rural Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.