Zippier ways to the Web

YOU HAVE a PC and a telephone, and a modem to connect the two. You have an Internet account and a password - so you are all set to surf the World Wide Web like an Olympic champ. Right?

Wrong. First you need to log on. This is not all that simple. How many times have you dialed the right number and found it busy? If you do get through, you then wait for the banshee howl that tells you your modem and theirs are exchanging calls. But accidents can happen.

The password that you have been using successfully for six months, will be rudely rejected with the advice that "Connection could not be established. Please check your password".

What is there to check? You re-enter it manually and for reasons unknown, it works this time. You are connected at 42,000 bits per second, you are told. You are all set? Not quite. You may be able to access your e-mail account; but mysteriously, no website can be reached. Sounds familiar? It happens one in ten attempts with some Internet service providers. Let us assume everything works. You go to the website of your choice and attempt to download a free utility or a picture - or any file that is a few hundred kilobytes long. That's when the fun starts: Your happiness at establishing a connection close to the fastest speed your modem can handle, vanishes when the download begins and the speed drops to 5 kilobytes per second, 4..3..2..1...500 bytes, 50 bytes. Yes, we know that the connect speed was in BITS per second and downloads are timed at BYTES per second and we are aware that we must divide the bits by eight at the least, to arrive at the bytes.

Most of the time, you cancel the download because the website sadistically informs you that at your current speed, the operation will take 40 minutes. You have not forgotten that in India you pay for the Internet access and then pay the telephone company again for the length of your call.

Frustrated at having crossed the toll station to the Information Superhighway, only to find that your vehicle is a bullock cart.

But there is hope for speed freaks. Surfers in Chennai are now being offered a couple of options that allow them to access the Internet 3 to 50 times faster than telephone-based connections. These appear at first look, to be much costlier - but when one computes the total cost of dial-up Internet including the telephone bills, the difference at the end of a year may not be much - indeed for heavy users these new technologies may even work out to be cheaper.

Net-thru-Cable

Local providers like Cyberwave and Hathaway, offer the option of accessing Internet through a cable that is similar, and could even be the same one that brings you those 70 odd TV channels. This is because such coaxial or fibre optic cables have a lot of surplus capacity. But if the Cable Net provider is different from your neighbourhood Cable TV agency, they will run separate cables. The advantage over dial-up connections is: "always-on" access to Internet - that is no telephone bills and no need to dial up. You do have to install a special Cable Modem which is much costlier than the conventional telephone-to-PC models - it will set you back by Rs. 10,000. There are different service levels for home and professional users; the cheapest cable net packages cost a little less than Rs. 1,000 per month.

The service normally entitles you to at least one email address. Cable-based Internet is typically about 50-60 times faster than the fastest dial up connection currently achievable - ie you could get speeds of around 3 Mega Bits Per Second (MBPS). But the actual speed is dependent on how many users are online on the same cable at a given time and if you achieve a speed that is ten times faster than a 56 K dial up modem, you should be happy. It is also wrong to think that 'always on' means you can surf as long as you like. Most providers impose a limit on how many Megabits of traffic you can generate in a month. If you exceed this limit you may be charged extra.

DSL service

The other high speed option that is available almost every where in Chennai, is Dishnet's Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) service. DSL is a communication technology which permits the conventional telephone-type line to simultaneously carry data at a speed that could be 100 times faster than what is achievable with today's dialup connections.

At its slowest, Dishnet's DSL service assures speeds of 64 kilobits per second but it could be as fast as 1.5 MBPS.

Also, DSL pushes data from your PC to the Internet ( or "uploads") at the slower speed ( 64 KBPS) while pulling or "downloading" data from the Internet at the higher speed (1.5 MBPS). This is neat; because we usually send very small packets of data out - usually requests to reach this or that website; while we tend to download large files - pictures, movie clips, music.

That is probably why the version of DSL offered by Dishnet is called ADSL or Asymmetric DSL - sedate in one direction, sleek in the other.

If you go to the website ddsl.net, and look at the pages dealing with Dishnet's DSL service, you can set up a real time demonstration that compares DSL download speeds with that of a dialup line. It is an exciting experience!

In theory, our normal telephone lines could just as well serve to carry DSL content as long as a special DSL modem is installed. But since the telephone department does not currently offer a DSL service, Dishnet will run its own cable to your door and link it to the nearest access point - a sort of mini telephone exchange. This also means that while technically speaking, the Dishnet DSL line can carry simultaneous voice and data information, in practice you cannot use it for voice calls because Dishnet is not a telephone company. Dishnet charges Rs. 995 per month for the DSL service. There is an initial charge of Rs. 29,970, for which it will provide the special modem which goes into the USB port of your PC. You can have up to 5 email addresses. You are allowed up to 1 GB of free traffic after which you have to pay Rs. 200 for every 100 MB. Unlike the Cable TV based Net access, the DSL line is not shared with other users so in theory should not suffer from sharp variations in transfer speeds. But both technologies will seem as a vast improvement over the telephone Net access we are used to.

With an Internet connection based on Cable or DSL, one can hope to harness Net resources like streaming video that would have been frustratingly slow with the dial up connection. Indian sites like Chennai's own numtv.com and sharkstream.com from Mumbai, already provide a rich multimedia fare that users in Singapore or the Gulf countries are able to enjoy with their broadband connections. Now you can do the same - and view all your favourite Sun and Asianet serials whenever you please. These services appear to be pricey today because the providers have to install their own cables all the way.

A few years from now, when the state is more completely wired the incremental cost of such broadband goodies will be negligible.

Today is it worth the asking price ? Maybe; it depends on how badly you want to exploit the Net's rich multimedia resources. What cannot be disputed is the fact that as consumers we finally have a choice of technologies to latch on to the Web: you can do it jalopy style - or like Narain Karthikeyan in his Jaguar.

A. VISHNU

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