When BSNL came up with the 2Mbps and 1Mbps plan, most of my friends who had Airtel 256Kbps line, jumped on to the BSNL bandwagon. I didn’t, for the simple reason that BSNL came with a data transfer limit! That is, only the first 1.25GB or so is free every month and after that you pay per MB. Ridiculous! Since I have had some bad experiences earlier with my 512Kbps/1.5GB-limit Airtel plan, I decided to stay away from all these and stick to my good old 256Kbps *unlimited*. Soon after that, Airtel upgraded me to 512Kbps unlimited, which I took with out much thinking. Now, after 1 year, Airtel offered (again!) to upgrade me to 1Mbps unlimited!!
The total amount comes to 2,222INR/month. Only today the 1Mbps plan got activated. Look at the following picture to see my new 1Mbps in action, downloading MinGW at 128KBps 
Worth every penny (or paisa…whatever!!)
Tags: 1Mbps, Airtel, Broadband, DSL, Fast connection, india, Personal
I also recently switched from my connection of 256kbps to the 1mbps. At the time of writing this comment I am running 2 streams of 192 kbps winamp audio streams, a file download from Microsoft and upload to my gmail account (I use it like an external hard drive). Still I can browse freely and watch cnn videos. The aggregate bandwidth sometimes exceeds 140 KB/sec.
But the price tag of 2222 is not for everyone, which after taxes comes to about 2500. For a power user this plan is a blessing. The BSNL outages are frustrating to the limit. At least in Airtel I can dial 121 to know why my broadband is not working (only once in two years of service it failed as their DHCP did not allow me, PPPoE was down). My monthly GB use is way beyond 50GB, so this is a blessing.
So for all power users, this 1mbps unlimited plan is a blessing, but you have to pay up. To give you an example a 192 kbps stream with TCP/IP overhead is like 19 KB/sec, is approx 0.02 MB/sec. So just listening to 10 hours a day you are looking at 60 x 60 x 10 x 0.02 = 720 MB. I don’t remember the last time I switch off my winamp. That is just multimedia. Data from my stock/options providers is about 400 kbps. I am trading about 8 hours a day plus I watch Bloomberg TV online. In my 10 hours I use about (800 kbps average use – download portion only), so in GB it is 3.72, so assuming 23 working days 85.56 GB. I will loose more money with BSNL than make. Airtel is simply the best, they keep their promise of speed. It is always there. No problem with speed/connection quality. Make sure the wiring in your house is correct and attach the modem to a protected power supply (no fluctuations).