After many tribulations, I finally have halfway-affordable ADSL at home. The provider is the government-run BSNL Bangalore Telecom District (in competition with the likes of ZeeNext. Bharti Telenet, Reliance Infocomm and Tata Indicom.
In India, broadband means something different compared to the rest of the world—it signifies “almost always on” rather than “large bandwidth”. For instance, the affordable offerings from BSNL (the cheapest provider at the higher end of the spectrum) top out at 1 Mbit/s, with most folks going for the cheapest option at 256 kbit/s. (This is what they’ve set my service up for, despite my explicit request for the 512 kbit/s offering, which has a more decent flat component—5 GB/month rather than 1 GB/month, with every megabyte beyond charged Re 1.50 for the 512 kbit/s option or Rs 2 for the 256 kbit/s option.) Most providers only provide IDSL (fancy ISDN) or “cable” (really Ethernet over coax) at 128 kbit/s (or worse, 64 kbit/s). Some of the wireless telephone service providers (notably Reliance and Tata) provide CDMA 2000 service at exorbitant rates and not-so-hot data rates of about 112 kbit/s. (Tata makes much of its business off the wireless Walky, which is essentially a mobile telephone in corded instrument form factor—for some odd reason it’s immensely popular.)
This is, however, “real” ADSL (albeit at an awful rate—currently at 256/64). It was surprisingly efficient for a government-provided service—about two weeks after registering for it (it is, after all, the government, so this is a near miracle), they got back to me and confirmed that I’d be home when the lineman came around. So today, he came and set up a DSL modem/router/firewall device, the Huawei SmartAX MT800 ADSL CPE. The forms said I could rent it for Rs 100 a month (with Rs 500 security deposit), but apparently in reality I didn’t have a choice and had to buy it for Rs 2,000. Fine, that isn’t so expensive. So for Rs 500 a month, I have PPPoA connectivity to the DSL modem (and PPPoE from the DSL modem to my computer). It’s attached via Ethernet to my box, so it was a cinch to get it running in Windows XP and Linux. It also incorporates a NAPT system with port forwarding and a packet-filter firewall (which suspiciously looks like a Web frontend to netfilter—Huawei’s known to build their devices around Linux); I’ve set my computer in the DMZ for the moment (of course with a netfilter firewall started up as part of the ip-up.d scripts), but I’ll tweak the rules a bit later.
Setting up PPPoE in Debian was pretty easy, by the way. I already had a dialer (GKDial, which sits in the KDE or GNOME system notification area, and which I’m trying to replace, since it loves to crash X and doesn’t seem to be able to monitor the connection) and pppd set up for my 56k modem, and apt-get install pppoe added a few files—the Roaring Penguin PPPoE stack and a couple of hookup scripts to let pppd complete authentication and stuff. I had to modify /etc/ppp/peers/dsl-provider to provide the log-in username and /etc/ppp/chap-secrets to provide the password. (BSNL, contrary to convention, decided to go with CHAP rather than PAP. Oh well.) After this, all I needed to do was to restart GKDial and set the DataONE ADSL connection as the default connection and dial out. 
I ended up signing up for one of those free dynamic-IP subdomain hosts and utilizing ifconfig to figure out the IP address; the script to tie all of this together went into /etc/ppp/ip-up.d, so now every time I connect (with a different IP address, I might add), the hostname is updated. Disturbingly, it seems to be set with a TTL of an hour, which might be too long, but oh well.
Anyway, it’s a relief not to have to wait as long for pages and content to load as I needed to on dialup. Hopefully getting my service upgraded even further won’t be as much of a hassle as, say, getting my telephone line shifted here was.
Happy birthday, Jorge.
GNOME 2.10 was released. I’ll try it when there are experimental debs for it. (No, Jorge, I am not switching to any flavor of Ubuntu.)
