Dimapur, Jan. 28: Nagaland?s net surfers are living through a virtual nightmare and that is putting the matter lightly.
Ask any surfer in the state and he is sure to tell the same tale: the modem keeps on making weird noises as the surfer waits, frets and fumes. Even if one is lucky to be connected to the web, the data flow is so slow that it?s enough to give headaches.
?Don?t even ask...the very thought of surfing triggers my migraine,? says Tainla, a housewife from Kohima.
?One day I frittered away four precious hours just to attach a mail as the byte (data flow) simply refused to kick up. With this kind of rickety connection, how can the government make tall claims about IT investments in this part of the world? asked Basu Damani, who has business interests both in Nagaland and Upper Assam.
?The cafes (cyber booths) don?t spare your pursestrings even if you can?t open a page?, said Shikato Sumi, a regular surfer at cyber cafes in Kohima.
That is the scene as far as connectivity goes in the capital town of Nagaland, Kohima. At other places, it is worse.
?Connected or not, we have to foot telephone bills and house rent,? said Raju Sharma, a cyber cafe owner at Dimapur, the commercial capital of the state.
But why is net connectivity as slow and as bad as it gets?
Limited bandwidth and high demand for Internet services are to blame, said a Dimapur-based official of the largest Internet service provider in the region, the BSNL.
?We do have an international standard dialling network line, our bandwidth is about 64 kilo bytes per second and our node is for about 600 subscribers each in Dimapur and Kohima. But we usually overload the network as we allow more subscribers to log in,? said BSNL Dimapur divisional executive (internal) Shanti Devi.
?The problem is the same in Kohima,? said another official.
There are other technical bottlenecks such as rusty or loose overhead copper wire connection of telephones, said Sharma. Net subscribers in the town generally get as little as four to five kbps connectivity speed, he added.
?We are already laying fibre optic cables across Dimapur and Kohima and have similar plans for all other districts,? said a BSNL official adding, ?Our net connectivity will also be much faster.?
However, a private Internet service provider claims that it is already dishing out Net on cable (land cable) in Dimapur at higher speed.
?Now, we have bandwidth of 128 KBPS,? said Dharmendra K. Giri, software engineer at the service provider. ?We have just taken off so our customer base is low. But this helps because you get greater bandwidth,? he added.
?The cutting edge of our services is round the clock connection through satellite,? he claimed. ?In the near future, we plan to increase the bandwidth to 512 KBPS and perhaps even dish out broadband connectivity besides rolling out our business to Kohima,? he said.