ADSL -> WiMax -> WiMax -> ADSL

Once upon a long ago, I was an SLT ADSL subscriber. I was not at all happy with the service and when moving house last year, decided to leave the link behind. What I opted for was a Dialog Broadband WiMax connection. Sadly getting hooked up with them turned out to be a very painfull affair. In frustration I decided to go back to SLT and well, it was worse. In the end I emailed the Dialog CEO and finally managed to get a WiMax connection from Dialog BB.

Getting online was just the first battle. Their WiMax service was far from trouble free. It suffered from frequent distruption but I put up with it until  and the last straw was when they messed up their billing and an Rs 12,500 payment ended up in a black hole. At that point I switched to Lanka Bell. In fact, I had decided even before this incdence to get a Lanka Bell broadband connection as a backup - it just became my primary connection and the Dialog was discontinued (interestly they never collected their equipment).

Lankabell had it's fair share of problems but the difference was that they were pretty attentive and fixed most issues quickly. Nevertheless there was a time when their service would suffer at least one disruption per week. At that point I realized that I needed a backup. But I was weary after having tried all the available services. Once I even picked up an STL application (no you can't download it). But in the end, I decided to wait for Airtel to arrive. I had to wait a long time and just as I was about to sign up for their service, I found out on twitter that their service is probably worse than all the others. For example they only provide private network IPs which rules out using torrents. The speeds weren't supposed to be so good either.

In the meantime, Lankabell finally figured out how to provide a reliable service and I didn't suffer any disruptions at all for the past three months or so. Nevertheless i have obtained an SLT link as well and how that connection was setup is another story in itself.