So, when I left for Bangalore to speak at Linx/Banglore 2003, I decided to give reliance mobile internet connectivity a try.

Given that most hotels in India still do not offer high-speed internet and one has to content with dialup (which is expensive), I wondered if a mobile connection would be any better.

I searched around and found Reliance gives a viable alternative on their CDMA 1xRTT network. The advertised speed is upto 144 kbps and the price is INR 24/hour (52cents/hour) – billed per second – with first 400 minutes free. Given that Reliance network is avaialble almost anywhere in India, what could have been better than this? (Okay, okay. speeds of 144Mbps and price of 52 cents / month could have been better but you got the point). I also thought I would be able to dial in from airport lounges (and taxi cabs!!) to check my mail. This looked like perfect Nirvana!!

So, I borrowed a Reliance phone from my company (they have a bunch of them which they bought for a project) and bought an INR1200 ($26) USB-to-phone connection cable. And was all set to dial-in.

The initial experience was good. With in minutes, the phone was registered and dialed in on the network and my laptop was downloading at 128 kbps. Works from the standard dialler on windows (and from what I have heard – on linux and Mac too).

I happily used this to check my early morning mail at delhi airport lounge and was very satisfied. I also later used in cab in Bangalore (it was about an hour long ride in the traffic) to sent out the mails that I wrote on the plane.

However, there was one annoying problem!! To optimise dialup time the network makes the connection “dormant” as soon as you are idle for 15 seconds. This meant that if no data has travelled for 15 seconds on the network then while the computer is fooled to believe that the connection is there, in reality it is disconnected. While you do not pay for connection time from hereon, it also means that the next request to the network will take longer (since it will require setting up the connection again). This got even worse when I reached Bangalore as this was outskirts of the city and the connection was not good and it took longer (about 7-8 seconds compared with 1-2 seconds in delhi) to connect. This caused my browser to timeout ocassionaly.

This would have been okay, if this 15 second interval was configurable somewhere but it was not (yes, I tried at+cta=255 etc) and it seems this was hard-coded somewhere on the network. Also, the technology is not perfect and ocassionaly the network was not able to sense that I want a reconnect and then I need to redial as I if there is a way to force the phone to get out of dormant mode, I could not figure that out. One alternative was to just leave a large download on all the time to keep the connection going but I felt guitly using it.

I also realised that the speed deteriotes as the connection lenght increases and the average that I could manage was about 50-60 kbps in off-peak hours (night and weekends) and about 20-30 kbps during day time. Nothing to boast about but almost an alternative to dialup which was available anywhere.

Inspite of these flaws, I do plan to keep a reliance phone and a data cable handy in my laptop case just in case I need to access internet from any place where no dialup is available.