Whither WiMAX in Bangalore?

2007 promises to be an exciting time for Broadband users in Bangalore. BSNL has promised 2 Mbps as default for ADSL. I am on the Home 900 plus 256 Kbps which offers unlimited downloads. If this gets automatically upgraded to 2 Mbps it will be bliss. Even though the good minister promises 2 Mbps in new year, the reality is there is probably some hardware upgradation involved and will be probably rolled out first on a few exchanges. It may be a while before every one gets it. Still, BSNL and the Telecom ministry needs to be applauded for pushing this forward. Private players will be soon forced to follow.

This brings me to the strange problem of getting connectivity in the first place. The consensus (at least in my Office) is that Airtel is the best (connectivity wise, don't talk about billing :-), followed by BSNL, followed by other options like Sify, Hathaway etc and to never go near Tata Indicom. However, getting Airtel or BSNL appears very tough. Even being in a "well connected" locality is no guarantee to get a connection. It seems that BSNL has virtually stopped giving connections in Bangalore. There seems to be a big "last mile" problem in Bangalore.

Which is where WiMAX comes in. There are reports that some company (probably Airtel) plans to cover whole of Bangalore with 2 Mbps WiMAX in 2007. The trouble is, while there are lots of news articles talk about WiMAX in Bangalore, no company website has any information about the launch. If that happens, it will be really a good thing.