Indian Railways and Wifi System

Today read an interesting article in economic times on indian raliways initative to wifi enable luxury trains like rajdhani and shatabdi express. If this happens then it will surely position railways back to the business traveller segment going to tier-II towns as taking an overnite train ride does not mean remaining disconnected from work. Beside travelling economy class in cramped up seat is surely not my style but remaining disconnected for long always discourage rail travel for me.

For me if railway put the Wifi instrastructure then should look at monetizing it further by just not concentrating on providing internet access but look at VOIP and to provide calling service from the train. As telecom penentration in rural areas is still not there which means railways can help increase rural telephony penetration but if it sound much then atleast deliver free interent connection to travellers.

Web Hosting india centric applications – Indian Vs US service providers

Cyberica has been co-locating its servers with sify hosting (earlier satyam) Level 3 data centre in vashi for almost 6 years now. Prior to that we had used server farms of cybercon and interland in US. In terms of service we dont have anything against either but over the years we have realized how important its to have web hosting in india for an india centric application. Couple of reasons

- Cost of support – Email and Telephone both are cheaper if service provider in india

- So many times in india the undersea cable link with US goes down making server co-located in US inaccessiable to indian market.

- Indian companies without any physical pressence in US are unable to procure own hardware and co-locate hence only option available is leasing. Which can be costly over 3-5 years period as on average investment made in hardware returns in 24-30 months.

But on the other hand their are not much indian service providers which provide lot of options for enterprises. In last couple of years we have seen amount of bandwidth rise in india. But very few private data centre players have emerged.

Options available in India

Sify Hosting :  – Personally using it excellent service and support. Very excellent server management process with almost nill down time.  1 U rackspace cost around INR 1.4-1.7 per annum depending on server and support pack taken. Advantage with them is they are not diversified into small web hosting or domain registration. Hence support infrastructure is geared to support enterprise centric hosting.

Net4india : – Data centre based in delhi, cheaper to sify hosting but service issues have been their in past with some peers using their services. Although they have improved a lot  recently a realiable hardware vendor recommeneded looking into their attractive pricing keeping in mind service quality levels have improved,a s for indian sme’s..price plays an important factor.

Palcom Online : – The company was funded by Panipat based exporters Paliwal Group. Started off with Class C License for ISP services for haryana. Couldnt capitalize much on that end and stayed away from corporate connections and services in booming gurgaon. They started off with small data centre in Kalkaji suburb in delhi with 2 MBPS leasedline.  Went once to their office not very impressive infrastructure wise but was churning customers away from sify and net4india on price issues and from local web hosting service provider on server availability in india.

VSNL – Even after being taken over by TATA the service quality level has not improved. The company data centre in bombay and delhi has poor service record and lack customer management expertise. price charged to customer is very high. Would not recommend!!

Reliance Communication -  Have not used their service yet so would not like to place comment.

Idea of sharing this information is if you wish to host an indian centric application you should look at US as temporary arrangement for 3-4 months and shift to an india centric hosting provider. This was low web hosting cost can help in bootstrapping and for testing of the application whereas when funds starts to pour in own dedicated server can give you better control and provide satisifaction of being available at all times to customers.