The City of Joy seems to have caught on to the dotcom bandwagon. Driving in from the airport, we could see huge billboards - lining roadsides, atop buildings, and in any other place they could find - advertising Websites that dealt with everything from entertainment to the stock market, and anything in between. But the ISP scene is just catching up with all this frantic dotcom activity.

We checked out four ISPs here - VSNL, Satyam, Caltiger, and OnlySmart. We didn’t check out Mantra and Sigma Online, because they’d just started their services in the city. OnlySmart is a local ISP. Caltiger started off in Calcutta, and is now expanding to Mumbai, Bangalore, Siliguri, Jamshedpur, and Guwahati.

Purchase
Satyam and OnlySmart have hoardings all over the city and you just need to dial the numbers mentioned there. We did face a problem with OnlySmart, though. The vendor to whom we were referred to by the helpdesk refused to sell us a 20-hour account. More calls to the helpdesk led us to a vendor who had to go to the OnlySmart office to get a 20-hour account for us. With Satyam, however, things went smoothly.

For Caltiger, there’s no such thing as buying an account, since it’s a free ISP. You just go to their Website and get your free account registered. Then, you download their adbar and install it. To use the account, you dial through the adbar application and get connected. The adbar docks to the top of your screen.

Registration and installation
We got our Caltiger free account registered easily enough, but couldn’t use it immediately, as it kept on giving authentication failure. It could be used only on the second day. Caltiger later informed us that during the period we were running our tests, they had declared shutdown for upgrades, which could probably be the reason for this.

OnlySmart gives you an installation CD, but the dialer installed by the CD simply refused to work for registering our account. Their helpdesk couldn’t give a satisfactory solution to our problem either. So, we had to use another ISP to go to their Website and register our account.

Help!
Both Caltiger and OnlySmart have good helpdesks. You can call them up anytime, though you have to wait a few rings before the call is picked up.

When we came to Satyam, an elaborate automated answering system directed us to the helpdesk, after a series of routings and key punchings. And the person we finally reached seemed to be in a hurry to get the call over with. As for VSNL, the helpdesk number was either permanently engaged or kept on ringing with no one to answer the call. This prevailed throughout the day. Definitely a disadvantage.

Performance
Only Satyam connected in the first attempt every time. Caltiger and OnlySmart gave fairly good connectivity and most of the times, connected in the first attempt. With VSNL, we could easily connect during the morning and noon, but towards the evening, we almost always got a busy signal. Sometimes, we were repeatedly prompted to verify the password.

That brings us to transfer rates, where actual performance is revealed. For VSNL, we got fair throughputs when we could connect - that is, during the morning and noon. Satyam gave fair throughputs throughout the day. The trend seemed to be that you had a little fall in throughput as the day progressed.

OnlySmart also gave us steady transfer rates across the day. We experienced frequent disconnects in the evenings, but conditions improved after 9:00 pm. On Caltiger, we got fair browsing speeds, but when it came to file transfers, the experience was not the same. However, we need to see their performance after the upgrade to be able to pass judgment.

The verdict
Calcutta’s peak Net surfing time seems to be the evenings, with many ISPs giving the busy signal or lower throughputs. VSNL needs to improve the number of telephone lines significantly. And a more helpful helpdesk would definitely be a help. OnlySmart’s performance in file transfer was among the best, but they could have done better in their installation software and in the capability of their helpdesk to handle tough customer situations. That leaves Satyam as our choice in the City of Joy.

Ashish Sharma@Calcutta