India’s fastest broadband: 8 Mbps Airtel Broadband Connection

Recently Airtel a leading private ISP in India announced the first ever 8 Mbps ADSL plans for Bangalore.

This step is in right direction. Personally, I’m happy with MTNL 2 Mbps plan. At work we have 155Mbps x 3 connections so I never worried about bandwidth.

The cost is as follows according to official website:
=> 4 GB limit/month INR. 1299
=> 8 GB limit/month INR. 2222
=> 20 GB limit/month INR. 4444
=> 50 GB limit/month INR. 9999
=> 100 GB limit/month INR. 19999

I wish it was bit cheaper, I need 20 GB plan around INR . 1500. Currently service only available in Bangalore and Chennai city.

Flying in your own plane

A few months ago, the India’s first aircraft showroom opened in Bangalore and they have sold few light aircrafts. Each aircrafts costs around 45-50 lakhs.

Time of India (TOI) reporting other costs of owing a light aircraft:

* Rs. 50,000 a year for maintenance
* Rs. 80,000 yearly insurance
* Rs. 2 lakh for a PPL training course (very high cost)
* Rs. 250 as airport landing charge
* Rs. 5-6 an hour for airport parking charge
* In an hour, in consumes 18 liters, cost you Rs.1200 and you can cover 190 km
Even Test flights cost you Rs.5000

Dam it is f*****g expensive. Only millionaires can own such aircraft.

Canara bank deploys Red Hat Linux on 10,000 desktops

Canara Bank in Bangalore is implementing RHEL over 1000 servers and 10,000 desktops, as part of its total branch computerization project. Canara is one of India’s large majority government-owned banks, The Indian government has taken good decision in favor of open-source :)

Read more here

Mumbai Rain floods and IT

Recent record rain in Mumbai took its toll on IT too. Many call center located in Mumbai diverted work/call to Delhi and Bangalore. This put lots of pressure workload in this cities.
Network administrator had their worst nightmare. Many of cities ATM, phone lines, Mobile networks were down. Although connections resumes now.
My friend needed some money here in Delhi so he went to SBI as well as HDFC ATM and guess what both were down due to rain in Mumbai. Most of the banks in India have data center in Mumbai and rain hits it very badly. In these days of cutting edge computers, Internet, and satellites banking operations should be easy. I don’t believe then don’t have backup servers and routing in first place :( . We claim to be number of hot spot for outsourcing jobs, but we don’t know how to handle such disaster.
These days lots of private data center exists in Delhi, pune, bangalore cities. Why banks in Mumbai partner with them for backup servers and routing i.e. outsource your work to other cities in India itself so rest of the people get service.

Because they have don’t have backup plan in Mumbai the entire banking network went on blink (network is unreachable!!!). This is not good for for developing economic.

Nearly 800+ people are feared to have been killed in worst-ever floods and loss of billions of dollars. May they rest in peace.

Wikipedia has article on Maharashtra floods of 2005.