BSNL’s DIAS
Recently there were a few posts about BSNL’s DIAS service to the india-gii mailing list. DIAS does offer a digital line with integrated voice+data, but with ISDN-grade speeds, and ordinarily would be nothing to write home about except for one thing — the price. Sink in Rs 2000, pay Rs 3000 as a refundable deposit, and plonk down Rs 1800 per month, and you are the proud owner of a line that does 128kbps. This is a great price if the line actually delivers anything over 100kbps. On the other hand, BSNL’s tariff’s for DIAS indicates that DIAS is (a) for now a pilot project (b) is capped at 1.5GB unless you pay 5k a month for unlimited usage. The capping doesn’t sound very encouraging, but I wonder how the service is (it’s currently available only in Anna Nagar, and because it’s a pilot, it’s unlikely to go elsewhere).

