Postcards From India: Day One: The Broadband Pipes, Literally

I am in India…arrived here last night, after a long trip. In my parent’s small town, as I have written before, we now have high-speed wireless, even though the town really never got a proper dial-up facility before this. Jumping the adoption curve…

Anyway, when they talk of broadband pipes into the home, they really mean it literally here…as the pics I took (on Flickr) will show, the cable is the thickest home-cable I’ve seen…as thick as a water pipe. The 1 MBPS service is a hybrid wireless local loop with cable coming into the house, ending in a USB connector which goes into my laptop. Very funky, if you ask me….

P.S.: I think I have an explanation for why the cable is so thick: cultural reasons, really. It has to be so that the pipe withstands the rather harsh weather conditions here. A regular ethernet cable would be toast in a few weeks. Another reason: there’s a lot of theft of electricity and cable TV signals here, so a thicker pipe prevents people cutting into the wires which runs over the roofs of people’s houses.

I have a short photo essay about the service here

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