Which International Call Service To Use? Skype Out vs Nimbuzz Out vs Viber Out

When it comes to making international calls, let’s agree that telcos have really expensive calling rates.
One of the option is to use the voice over IP solutions, however, it requires a lot of planning from both the parties — from setting up a time to actually checking whether your mic is working. Hangouts on Android can actually solve a bunch of these issues if it also allowed one to just initiate a voice call instead of a video call.
I have compared three services that allows you make calls from your desktop or smartphone app to anyone with a cell phone or PSTN phone.

*Skype mentions that there might be additional connection fees applicable / ~ really variable rates

Couple of observations:

1. There’s no clear cut winner when it comes to making international calls. That is, if you want to make calls to multiple destination and want to enjoy the best price, you’ll have to keep switching between the apps
2. In all the countries that I looked for, Skype turned out to the costliest. Besides that, Skype offers way too many options to the consumers and thus confusing them. Almost every plan has some sort of conditions attached to it
3. Viber Out seems to be providing consistently best plans for most of the countries. If you have to buy credits from just one country, you cannot go wrong with Viber

Obviously, the trick here is to research on various services and pick up the best on that suits you. However, if you need to call up multiple destination and don’t want to bother with buying credits from different services, Viber Out would be the clear cut choice.


So which international calling service are you using?

Tc & Be Safe :)


#Voip #Internet


#gotoarif

The Struggle to find a perfect 3G Operator in Mumbai

Trying to find the best 3G operator is like trying to find Nirvana. More so when the price war between the operators have ended and there’s little or no difference in the quality of service these carriers offer.

I have been dependent on Vodafone’s 3G service in Mumbai circle for some time. However, it’s getting frustrating when it switches to edge while commuting in local trains where I spend more or less 2 hours a day. Now I don’t mind if the speed lowers to edge, but the Edge connection on Vodafone is such that it literally takes 10 minutes to just open up a page, which is again very frustrating. 

Hence, I recently decided to make a switch. Over the last few quarters, we have seen heck loads of consolidation in the telecom market making it easier for carriers to offer little to nothing innovation when it comes to pricing. I tried to collect and analyze 1GB 3G data plans in Mumbai offered by all the telecom operators in Mumbai circle.

Turns out:

1. Most of the operators offer same rates for 1GB 3G, be it postpaid or prepaid.
2. Only RCOM seems to offer somewhat inexpensive 3G data.
3. While all operators offer similar 3G tariff on both, prepaid & postpaid connections, Idea seems to punish postpaid customers. Quite idiotic!
4. MTNL does it right by favoring its postpaid users who are committed to them for a longer.

Here’s how I eliminated options:

1. I've previously had a very horrible experience where Airtel charged me outrageous amount of money accidentally clicking on banner ads on my touchscreen mobile. Considering Airtel again was out of question as it tries in engage in unethical tactics to charge users.
2. I was previously with Idea for few months, until DoT decided that carriers shouldn’t be allowed to share their 3G network among themselves. At that time Ideas was sharing Vodafone’s 3G data service to offer to its users. While I’m not aware of whether it still share’s Vodafone’s 3G service, but my gut feeling says that it does, which means I would be getting back on Vodafone’s network.
3. I eliminated MTNL for the sole reason that I have to visit MTNL’s office to a SIM card, and I wanted some quick process to get a new SIM.

Do share which carrier you are using for 3G data in Mumbai.

Tc & Be Safe :)

#3g #Operator

#gotoarif

How Recharging and Paying Bills Online help you Save Money? My Analysis

On a daily basis many of us worry about increasing costs and mobile tariffs are not an exception here. While we can continue to talk or rather rant about service providers not keeping up their quality even after increasing tariffs significantly, it is also possible to reduce the price hike burden on our pockets. I would be sharing some tips along with few of my own experiences on how one can save money when it comes to maintaining a communication vehicle – cellular phone, landline phone, internet etc.

Online Recharge/Bill Pay Advantage

The best way to save money would be to use different online avenues available. Online options offer significant benefits to anyone who wants to save money. When it comes to online recharge, an end user, in addition to service provider’s websites, can go with third party websites like Paytm.

Service Provider

1. Majority of service providers offer exclusive benefits for users recharging or paying bills through their portal. For instance,
   • BSNL provides reward points for paying bills online and additional points if you have opted for ebills. These points can be redeemed for free call units.
   • Airtel offers web exclusive offers like full talk value and allows users to pick coupons that can be used for online shopping.
2. Certain service providers may even track your usage/recharge pattern and offer you surprise benefits. Airtel showcases such an option in their recharge portal.

Though official operator recharge portals have some things to offer, it is the third party websites which provide real value to consumers.

Third Party Websites

1. Shopping Coupons: Online recharge portals have been always offering coupons which can be used for online or offline shopping. While some providers charge a flat handling fee for coupons many offer several free coupons and paid coupons at nominal price. I would suggest picking free coupons anytime and paid coupons only if you are sure that you will be using them within the last date mentioned there. On the other hand, you can also check a recharge portal for discount coupons and recharge your phone for a nominal amount when you plan to buy something! This specifically holds good when you don’t find coupon codes for certain portals elsewhere. Eg. You cannot get discount coupons for Flipkart, but you can of course earn some Paytm cash!
2. Cashback: Cashback offers are common on special days and often form the prize for contests. One of the best offers I got so far was the 2013 offer from Paytm in December 2012. For a deposit of Rs. 2013 in Paytm cash, users were rewarded with Rs. 2500. Paytm had to revise the offer after few hours due to an overwhelming response (they gave Rs. 2100 instead of Rs. 2500 for those who joined later). Now that is the power of great offers and proves it is wise to be an early adopter! While we would not encourage social media spamming contests (which require you to follow the handle and tweet several hundred times with hashtags), contests can also held in a nice way – like first 100 users who respond or the best tweet and so on. Speaking about personal experience, just by using Paytm I managed to earn at least Rs. 200 – Rs. 500 per year in cashback. This may look like a small amount, but I am a firm believer in A Rupee Saved is Rupee Earned. My latest earning was through PaytmValentine’s day offer – a Rs. 100 cashback.
3. Welcome back offers: As much as sites want to gain users they also like to retain them. This prompts them to offer ‘Welcome Back’ coupons. You can expect welcome back coupons from leading recharge portals like Freecharge when you don’t use the portal for few months. The welcome back offer can be anything like 5 – 15% discount or some cashback.
4. Value additions: Recharge sites like Paytm offer recharge through IVR or SMS (Pre-requisite: Balance must be available in secure Paytm Cash account). This will be your best companion if you are away from your PC and have no access to a retail outlet.

Takeaway: Study the different recharge options available and choose that suits your needs.  Remember to maximize the earnings. To illustrate, take the example of Paytm Valentine’s day offer: The condition was 14% cashback subject to a maximum of Rs. 100 and the minimum recharge must be Rs. 300. Now 14% of Rs. 300 is only Rs. 42. A quick calculation revealed that I need to recharge for at least Rs. 715 to get full Rs. 100 cashback. To my luck there was a full talk value of Rs. 750offer from BSNL and I managed to get it. Incase of Paytm, most of the times, adding to Paytm cash counts as a transaction and hence if you do not need to recharge your number, just add some Paytm cash. After all no bank gives you so much interest for such a short time!

Never miss a full talk value offer

Some service providers do not offer full talk value on recharges all the time. Take the case of BSNL, such offers come up mainly during festivals. In such situations, we would suggest you togo for high value recharges – say Rs. 1000 and above. BSNL also provides 10% extra for recharges above Rs. 1000 at such times. In such a case Rs. 1000 becomes Rs. 1100. Now one might argue, I don’t spend Rs. 1000 on calling. Fine, even I don’t.  But you can use the balance to activate STVs. STV activations by SMS works out to be cheaper!

Keep an eye on what your Bank Offers

Major private banks like ICICI always have special offers on recharges. Sometimes they are valid for first time users, sometimes for anyone. You can avail them at least once in that case. Same holds good for many other banks. To make mobile apps popular banks often offer exclusive app offers.

When doing a recharge or paying a bill make it a point to use the card which gives you maximum reward points. Note that reward points are no longer a feature on credit cards – they come on debit cards and net banking usage too. These reward points can be redeemed later at some stage!

Paying in Advance for Long Duration

If you have a reliable service provider for Internet or Landline telephone, you can opt to pay the rent in advance for longer duration. Service providers like BSNL, Beam Fiber allow up to 3 years and 2 years advance payment respectively. BSNL waives off one month’s rent for one year’s advance payment and Beam Fiber works out to be significantly cheaper than paying monthly.Though the amount looks huge at once, in most of the cases you will be saving a princely amount. So do the math!

To Readers

What are your money saving tips on recharges or bill payments? Are you still using paper recharge coupons or visit corner shops to get recharge done? Let me know through comments!

Disclosure: I have been a happy Paytm user ever since they started their services!

Image Credits: Paytm

Tc & Be Safe :)

#Onlinerecharge #paybills

#gotoarif

How to Watch FIFA 2014 on Your Smartphone

User Knowledge - All

Location - India

The Football World Cup is here and with people getting busy with their lives, it is often difficult to catch up on the matches on the go. Today we’ll tell you how to watch Fifa World Cup 2014 on your smartphone on the go. A pre-requisite is a fast internet connection so either you get a 3G/4G pack on your device or get a fast speed Wi-Fi connection.

Sony Liv Sports application which is the official application for the football world cup offers a live stream alongside the telecast. An in-app purchase of Rs 120 will allow you to get the complete World Cup streaming on your phone or you can choose to get a single team’s matches for Rs 60. With the twists in the World Cup already coming into action, we suggest you go in for the Rs 120 purchase.

You can also download the Tata Sky TV application which will offer you free services for a month and charge you Rs 60 for it post that. After downloading the application, you need to activate Everywhere TV service.  This app makes more sense than anything else as it gives you access to all the channels for free in addition to the World Cup. But this is valid only if you are a Tata Sky subscriber.

Both the apps are available for iOS as well as Android.

Tc & Be Safe :)

#fifawordcup2014 #smartphone

#gotoarif

How You Can Improve Internet Experience With Better DNS?

User - Intermediate

Location - All / India

One of the common problems with Indian Internet users face is problem with DNS. The issue is kind of worst on BSNL’s DNS servers.

What exactly is DNS?

DNS stands for Domain Name System. It is responsible for converting for domain names like google.com into IP address – 74.125.235.49.

So you can visit the website on url http://google.com then using a hard to remember IP address like http://74.125.235.49

How exactly DNS works?

For working, DNS relies on the core part – the root DNS servers also known as gTLD (Generic Top Level Domain) servers which hold the data for all popular extensions like .com/.net/.org etc, apart from that, there are root servers for ccTLD’s for Country Code Top Level Domains like .in, .us, .co.uk etc.

These DNS servers just hold the data about the responsible DNS servers for perticular domain. E.g in case of “google.com” the root servers which hold data of all .com domain names, know that DNS servers responsible for google.com are ns1.google.com, ns2.google.com, ns3.google.com and ns4.google.com with their IP addresses. These servers actually hold the name to IP mapping of google.com.

That is, there exists an A record (stands for address record) for google.com to the respective IP addresses.

How do you reach these root DNS servers?

This is where ISP comes in. To make things super simple – most of ISP’s use so called DHCP – Dynamic Host Control Protocol – which is used for allocating certain things like IP address, subnet mask, default gateway and the DNS resolver addresses automatically whenever you connect to ISP. So, you actually use DNS via ISP’s DNS resolvers.

What exactly are DNS resolvers?

DNS resolvers are simply the part of Domain Name System which are responsible for resolving a particular domain name. E.g take an example – you want to open http://mail.google.com on your BSNL broadband connection. Here, your system will ask DNS resolver of ISP i.e BSNL – for the IP address of mail.google.com – next it will wait for reply.

DNS resolver – upon reciving a “DNS query” will try to look into it’s cache to see if it knows IP address for mail.google.com – assuming you opened for the first time – it will not find IP in cache. Next, it will look into the right most part to find what is the first level domain associated with that hostname – which is .com in case of mail.google.com

Now, BSNL DNS resolver holds the IP address of all gTLD root servers, and it will go to the nearest one and will ask for the next part – “google.com”. Here root server will pass a non-authoritative reply telling it ns1,ns2,ns3 and ns4.google.com are responsible for the DNS zone of “google.com”.

So next, DNS resolver of BSNL will go any one of those (depending on nearest and efficient route) and will ask for “mail.google.com” IP address, which will be provided by the authoritative DNS servers of Google along with a TTL. Next, DNS resolver of BSNL will pass you the IP address of mail.google.com.

What exactly TTL and DNS caching means?

TTL means Time To Live. It make system more efficient by caching off the DNS records. When you ask for IP address of mail.google.com to BSNL’s DNS resolver, once it resolves the hostname by querying root DNS servers, and further the Google’s DNS server – it caches that record. DNS resolver keep the record in cache based on the time mentioned in TTL (in seconds).

So if mail.google.com has a TTL value of 3600 – it means DNS resolver can keep this hostname to IP maping for 1hr period. Based on the standard, DNS resolver is permitted to discard these packets before completion of TTL, but under no condition they are permitted to keep these records for more time than mentioned in TTL.

So what exactly is problem with DNS for Indian users?

Problem is with DNS resolvers. Most of ISP’s DNS resolvers are not really optimised and perform poor during peak load. They are not optimised to keep all records in cache and thus, they keep on dropping cache data well beyond the expiry of TTL, apart from that – most of DNS resolver become non-responsive during peak load which gives – “name not found” error, even when you are connected to Internet.

So, what’s the way out?

Way out to this problem is – using other available DNS servers. Google recently started offering Free Public DNS resolvers to users across the world, which perform lot better then compared to ISP’s DNS resolvers. The other popular option is OpenDNS. Based on my tests, I found OpenDNS is not very good way to issue since they don't have any server located in India, and they route all traffic via London or Singapore location – which increases latency significantly.

So which one is best DNS resolver for me?

I highly recommend using open source tool called Namebench which checks all available DNS resolvers to you, and find which is best in terms of performance by sending them over few thousand queries.

I personally prefer using Google DNS over OpenDNS because Google DNS replies in less time, apart from no crazy DNS redirection for non-existent domain names as what OpenDNS does – making situation little frustrating.

After you choose which DNS resolver to choose, you can change DNS servers in Windows as:

1. Click on the connection link near the bottom of screen.

2. Click on “Properties”

3. Under “General Properties” tab – select Internet Protocol (IPv4) and click “Properties”.

4. Next, in the lower part of screen select the radio button – “Use following DNS server addresses:”

5. Next Enter the two DNS resolvers. Incase you use namebench, it will provide you with IP address of prefered servers, else you can use 8.8.4.4 & 8.8.8.8 for Google Public DNS, while 208.67.222.222 & 208.67.220.220 for openDNS.

Hope this will help you to fix DNS resolver issues and eventually a better experience on Internet!

#gotoarif

Why Broadband Internet Is So Poor In India?

User Knowledge - Beginners/intermediate

Location - India


You must have thought few times – why really speeds are so slow. If not slow, then you have “capping”.

Fact is – most of broadband connections in India are “capped” in either speeds or in usage. When you can get 2 Mbps speed for 250 Rs a month plan, why speeds get 1/4th when you go for un-metered 512Kbps plan?

I started doing some research on my own and I would like to share some of data, that will help you to understand what’s really wrong in case of India.

To understand what’s wrong, we need to first look into how exactly we are “physically” connected. Most of Internet is all about server – client based architecture. Clients are end user machines which ask for data – like you (the end user) streaming a video on youtube, and servers are machines which serve data (like youtube’s servers at Google datacenter).

Most of these servers are placed on high capacity connections at data centers, with highly redundant power systems, and cooling systems. “Connectivity” is all about connecting end user system to these servers.

We can broadly classify whole connectivity into 3 parts:

1. Last mile – “link from telephone exchange/BTS/pop to your home”

2. Middle mile/Core network – “the backbone network of ISP”

3. Data Centers – “place where data is located”

Let’s try to understand each of them.

Last mile:

As said, last mile is link from telephone exchange to your home. This can be over copper wires in case of DSL, co-axial cables in case of cable broadband, wireless spectrum in case of 3G, WiMax etc.

Middle mile/core network:

This refers to backbone connectivity of ISP. This consists of links over Optical fibres mostly ranging in few Gbps. E.g most of core network routers of BSNL-NIB are presently on 10Gbps. Here ISP’s set some core high capacity routers linked over meshed fibre links.

It’s much like connectivity states with National highways, and connecting cities with state highways. State telco like BSNL has quite impressive network in this case covering over 4 lakh+ villages over fibre links.

Data Centers:

This is where real data lives in!

These are building where web hosting companies/ big content providers etc all co-locate their servers. These data centers are linked to mostly a “few” ISP’s with reliable fibre links. Servers inside are mostly over Gbps ethernet and sometimes directly over fibre cables itself.

So what’s really problem in above picture in case of India?

Answer is complex!

It varies from technical part, to commercial part. From company to company – all have their own challenges. Technically speaking – last mile is a problem beyond tier 2 cities as quality of copper (mostly BSNL telephone lines) is quite poor.

Most of lines are poorly sliced/managed and have really high noise making it almost impossible to provide high bandwidth after a distance of 1Km. For most of tier 3,4 cities only viable option right now is wireless connectivity. Building a wired network is not possible due to very low ARPU’s making it totally non-feasible.

One thing we need to understand here is – when we talk about rural India, challenge is not to provide 20 Mbps connectivity to all, but is to provide with just say ~5 Mbps connectivity to few people (demand is still very low).

In cities like Delhi, Chennai – challenge is totally different. Here we have more demand for bandwidth from lot more people. Till now there seems no scalable wireless technology (well, no comments on LTE) to provide everyone with high speed connection. 3G technologies like HSPA etc again are limited due to limited spectrum. Do not expect them to be an alternative to wired broadband especially in big cities.

About wired connectivity in big cities – it’s certainly good. It is possible to have speeds of ~8 Mbps for most of users over DSL itself. If you observe ISP’s offering, most of them are actually offering those speeds (8 Mbps, 16 Mbps & even 24Mbps) but plans are still very expensive.

Why a 8Mbps plan is SO expensive in big cities?

This is all about demand-supply rule – less demand so essentially expensive stuff. We used to pay 16Rs/min for outgoing on cell phone, remember? :)

Carriers like Airtel (who have a good last mile in top 90 cities) don’t see a heavy demand for high speed. In case of State telecom – BSNL, problem remains their International bandwidth cost (apart from poor management, as we all know).

We already have quite good domestic backbone linking almost all districts over high capacity fibre optic links. Domestic backbone is clearly quite good in case of BSNL, and even private telcos who are now laying cables in groups but International bandwidth is a challenge.

In simple – for small ISP’s, International bandwidth is a problem. They can’t give cheap broadband based on what they get themselves from big players. And in case of big players, fact is – they have spent a few billion $$$ on those big high capacity links and (surely) they want to extract as much returns as they can from their investment ;)


Tc & Be safe


#gotoarif