[pjthevj]

hi...those netway guys came to my home n put up a STB. its good but the internet on the PC is still unavailable . i'm writing this on my TV with a crammed remote.so its short .best thing is that it has got 250+ movies. i'll write more from a cafe someday. or gimme a call for more detaails.

[city02]

Lucky!
what city r u in?
what are they charging?

[AmanJ]

1st of all congrats pjthevj.
Now the questions
hey whats the price u paid 4 the installation
did u call them or they themselves came for the installation
which all channels r they providing
what r the value added services
how's the internet speed
how's the overall service quality
where r u from
whats the helpline number
when will the service b launched in other cities

I hope u dont mind answering so many questions
but these may b the questions which most of us could have imagines of.

[dda]

hey....pjthevj...post more information about service.. some photos if possible... what are the charges.... ???

[pjthevj]

about 150+ channels..from every state n most of the major countries all with .5 hr pause delay.internet on TV is comparable to webworld in speed.i didnt call those ppl..they themselves came n put it n no charges as they r testing it.

[pjthevj]

Well this netway stuff is not a recent phenomena..... I’ve been using the STB of reliance since about June 2000.

My Place: Well i'm a reliance employee relative and i live in colony of RIL. About 4 years back a few people came to my place and a several houses in my sector and installed a STB( hadn't heard of it before). our township has its own cable tv setup n coaxial cables run to all the houses. there were some changes made to the cabletv setup... some frequencies changed n voila the thing started.

Brief history: The stb was called choispad( ver 100). this version was a white metallic box with hard disk in it. it was a bit heavy and had a lot of heating problems. it became too hot too early. the cable running to the home was split into 2 by the BNC-T connector--- one went to the tv and the other to the choispad. from chois pad the 3 AV wires were plugged in to the tv. the whole thing worked on the av mode of the tv which is the case now also. on the back of the chois pad were a serial port, a parallel port, a RJ45 plug for the connection with the computer. now the internet speed was good....certainly better than the 4 kbps i used to get on dialup.but still yeh dil maange more!!!
This thing had 3 sections:
1. Channels: there were about 45-50 channels neatly arranged into categories of their content and each channel in front of it had a “now showing” TV guide. There were a set of 6-7 channels that had a facility of pausing( big thing again in those days) of about 30 mins.
2. Internet: then there was this option of internet on tv. again the most popular sites were arranged in sections like mail, news,family etc… n one could surf using a remote( size of a normal tv remote with all the 26 alphabets on it – and the remote had different settings for upto 4 users n the remote was given a name-- Choiser). But typing was cumbersome.
3. Magazines: the last option was of magazines where in there were songs(audio only)- both English n hindi… info about some tourist places… classifieds section… the telephone directory of our colony and a lot more stuff came in as the time went by. Say something like r-world world but on a very small scale n with out the identity of the user.

Choispad was developed by Innomedia technologies in Bangalore n those ppl installed the choispad in several homes in Bangalore. All the servers were in Bangalore and the updation things were done from there itself. I think innomedia is a subsidiary of reliance ind. ( infocomm was still a dream then).

The thing was working well until suddenly one day choispad 101 came in which I talk about later.

[pjthevj]

things i forgot to mention--
1. the choispad was free to use then as it is today. but it was not owned by me. it was theirs n they had the right to remove it n put in someone else's house.

2. the front panel of the choispad: there were 2 notable things--- a set of 3 leds one for the network other two for the communication Tx and Rx. and a slot for inserting a smart card tough we didnt ever use it

[emmi]

pjthevj, on Jun 13 2004, 03:45 PM, said:

things i forgot to mention--
1. the choispad was free to use then as it is today. but it was not owned by me. it was theirs n they had the right to remove it n put in someone else's house.

2. the front panel of the choispad: there were 2 notable things--- a set of 3 leds one for the network other two for the communication Tx and Rx. and a slot for inserting a smart card tough we didnt ever use it

Can u include some pics of it, cant wait to see how it looks.

[pjthevj]

Ok now… I continue my discussion with the choispad 101 !!

Well after using the choispad 100 for about 2-2.5 years…. One day the innomedia people came up with choispad 101.

Nothing new except VIDEO ON DEMAND. It had got 3 parts
1.hindi—all with hindi movie songs and most of them with videos and some 10-15 hit movies.
2.enslish—English songs and about 20 movies( most of them were animated ones).
3.Juke box: a juke box where in u can create your own playlist

the songs in each lang were arranged neatly acc. Actor ,actress ,movie ,lyricist ,playback singer and all. Then there was this VAKI panel which showed whether the song was a Video/Audio/Karaoke/Instrumental. Or all of them.

In hindi section was antakshari where in one could select a song and then a antakshari would automatically continue from the songs present in the server.

The choispad 101 had a 20GB hard disk and the songs n movies were downloaded before playing. It took about 90 secs to download 60 secs worth of video. Sometimes it was faster/slower depending on the traffic. Nothing was available for the disk management. As new stuff was downloaded the old things got deleted…also had an option of explicitly deleting a video.

Channels had a new feature of making a list of channels u see and thus surf them quickly without worrying to go into each of the sections. Kinda playlist of channels

Internet had a option of checking the usage in each of the sections like channels, magazines, vod or internet. The list or top ten users could also be seen. The weekly monthly usage reports were also available.
The internet speed on the computer also improved considerably. I used to get about 100kbps at the download test of www.pcpitstop.com in the peak time…. But lately it went down.
Well it was fun downloading GBs of material from the net. I downloaded the whole ferdora project linux twice( about 2 Gb each time).
The smart card slot was still not in use but the guys said that in the future it would be so advanced that u could do ur shopping from the shops registered with reliance from the choispad itself sitting at home and the amount will be charged to ur smart card.

The heating problem of choispad 100 was reduced a bit but it was still not enough. The whole STB became heavier due to the HDD.

Then in the 3rd week last month came the guys with choispad 110 (dunno where the versions 102 to 109 went) which had got even more to offer!!!

[Ashokjp]

letme confirm a small thing
By 100kbps do you mean 100kb/s
i mean 100kilobytes per second ??

[pjthevj]

well the pcpitstop shows 100Kbps(kilobits) in peak times which well crosses that in lean time. but while downloading i did get near to 100KBps(kilobytes-- ie in tune of 800 Kbps) at some of the servers that i downloaded from. but getting 50-65 KBps was normal while download.

i dunno y the figures disagree a lot from the pcpitstop.com tests... may be the server of that site may be catering high traffic or something. neways i mentioned the figures of that site as a benchmark

[Ashokjp]

Try downloading a file from downloads.microsoft.com with a download accelerator.
It might give you a approximate speed..

[Ashokjp]

Can this Internet be used on PC ?

[Greens]

Get us some pics buddy.

[pjthevj]

of course u can use the internet on the pc... as i mentioned that there is a RJ45 port at the back of the choispad ... this can be connected to the network card of ur PC using the normal grade UTP