My trip to India

This is one of the better intersections in the city.

Recent telecom boom has created antenna farms everywhere. This was across from a major shopping area in one of the best neighborhoods. Zoning must not be a problem here.

McDonalds booth in the mall lobby

Pizza anyone? It's not cheap according to the locals. Dominos and Pizza Hut are considered high end pizza restaurants.

We arrived here on Saturday afternoon. The next day I wanted to fire up my computer and access the internet. There were two phone lines in the house; the landline and the Wireless local loop (WiLL) phone. The landline had the outgoing calls disabled and the WiLL phone was used to make outgoing calls. Wireless Local Loop is a CDMA based technology that enables developing countries to quickly get phones in the homes where landline infrastructure is not available or is in bad shape. The WiLL phone provided better reception than the landline even though it was a wireless connection.

The WiLL phone also had acted as a modem (similar speeds to 1XRTT CDMA); it connected to the computer using the serial port but the phone end had the RJ45 port. It was the weirdest configuration I had ever seen. I wonder why they don't use USB. It seemed like a very old version of WiLL phone, after connecting the service provider webpage opened up which did not exist. It provided average speeds of 88kbps on the downlink. That is a little faster than the modem speeds. I couldn't make it work on my laptop; I kept getting frame errors. I tinkered around with my laptop, changed the MTU, RWIN settings but it never worked. I ended up using the computer at home for browsing the net.

I needed my computer to connect to the internet so I can use VPN, outlook, etc. I googled for cybercafes in the city and found a small list of cybercafe. One of them was 'Cafe Mint'. They had wifi connection, for free! First day I was there I spent nearly three hours there. There were a few other people there. It was a cafe with a huge menu. I ordered a latte (67 cents) and a sandwich ($1). Unfortunately their router was really old and could not support VPN. They had the highest speed I would receive while in India, 128 kbps.

One of the new thing I saw this time was that there were buses and rickshaws running not on gasoline but on compressed natural gas. This helped quiet a bit with the pollution. Afterall I was in the worse polluted city in India. Usually my eyes burn in the traffic but it didn't happen this time. They still have a long way to go but this is a good start.

Noise pollution and dust still remains a problem. No matter what they build or make in India; it looks old in a few months because of the dust and other stuff in the air. I left my black notebook on the table for a couple of days and I could not even recognize it as it was covered with dust.

Indians are finally building better expressways. I went to Baroda (about 75 miles away). It used to take over two hours. With the new National Expressway-1, it took a little over an hour. It was a four lane expressway with two tolls of about $1.50 each. The tolls were set to odd numbers like 61 ruppes. It's like having a toll for $1.46 in US. Why can't they make it 60 or 65?