I have received the copy of the reply from local office of BSNL. I shall be taking the picture of relevant pages and uploading it soon; it of course depends on my convenience.

Needless to say, it is highly inadequate. I have the right to appeal; but dragging them to Information Commission straight away is not possible. It does not discourage me, to be honest because I had expected this stone walling.

I am taking a legal opinion on this and would update this space soon. I don’t have an access to a scanner; so I would have to snap it up, convert it to a PDF and then upload it somewhere and embed it. Or perhaps directly from image uploading site.

Truly, their attitude sucks. I really don’t know what have they done to deserve my hard earned money to support them.

I had applied for information under RTI act on wide ranging issues. Since I have nothing to do with the wireless version, therefore, none has been sought. I have deposited the requisite fees (the information runs over 21 pages!) and waiting for them to post the whole thing to me.

I wanted to inspect the documents first; however, it would have meant extra paper work and going to their office; I decided against it. All I need is the reply from their office and I shall update it over a period of time here. In case there is any inconsistency, I have the right to appeal and approach the state information commission.

The big issue here is that it does not constitute ways and means to force them to change their policies; it cannot be done specially when they are going to argue that 256 kbps “unlimited” is dirt cheap per month. The bigger issue is whether 2 Mbps can be made the norm or not.

TRAI has refused steadfastly as far as the definition of broadband is concerned. They haven’t given me any “extra information” on that count. They have also not mentioned as to who has defined the broadband. They took the cover of contestable ITU definition that is as vague as it can be. I am sure that BSNL would duck under cover of “regulator” knows it all. Hence, we are back to square one.

Who decides then that 2 Mbps should be bare minimum? I think that RTI should provide us some answers regarding the pricing details and their sources. It’s a long drawn process and companies don’t want to act because it would spoil their status quo. TRAI’s officials are looking at post retirement lucrative options to join a fancy board of some telecom company. It is easier to feed fat a bastard than to service the mass of customers. We all know the story, isn’t it? Specially when Pradeep Baijal was hauled up by the investigative agencies. Backroom manipulations ensured that there was not much drama made out of the “news”. No one knows who Baijal is and frankly no one cares.

It’s a messy country.

Lets wait for their answers to come. The application submitted in their ‘dak section’ would take at least 1 day to wind it’s way towards the orders; the file containing the reply would take another 2-3 days to be dispatched and thereafter it is at the mercy of Department of Posts to deliver it to my premises. Do you know that a speed post (courier) takes 5 days to be delivered WITHIN the same city? Specially when I stay just 3 kms from the exchange and the head post office?

Deva re deva!

I was fooling around and made some changes to the theme and installed plug ins to improve the page performance. I wasn’t really aware that this no longer requires massive tinkering with the server side scripts/files. It’s all GUI based now (I know, I am very very late to the party now!). Still, it was a revelation to update it so easily including installing themes/widgets and some other modifications.

I don’t get a huge amount of traffic anyway but I have updated the social plug ins at bottom of the each post. I wanted to set up an email system with perhaps email delivery to the inboxes but decided against it. We get so much spam as it is and it’s not worth it. For me, RSS rules my life in terms of content delivery and it has been highlighted on the main page itself.

Changes bring forth a newer perspective and rejuvenates the thought process. Although most users perhaps don’t ever need to come on the web site (since the RSS feed summaries are full on by default), still, it makes sense to have a fresh outlook.

A very happy new year to all the readers and this year too we are without any advertisements. Thanks to my web master, thanks to all those who are involved in the upkeep of this blog and thanks to you readers. Although I must admit that I do miss engaging content discussion but due to paucity of time and other commitments, I am unable to do full justice to this space.

I am waiting for BSNL RTI reply to detailed questionnaire and that should see a lot of activity in the near future.

Cheers!!