Much as I like the railwire concept for what it is offering and their pricing; this whole project has doomed written all over it.
Railways laid optical fibre for their operational reasons a long time ago. The amount of bandwidth available exceeds their needs; so some genius figured out that they can sell this excess in the open market. This probably sounded like a great idea a decade back. But factor in babus, a telecom cartel and the fact that raw fibre is less than 10% of the cost of running a modern ISP business, you have a recipe for a pilot program that will crash eventually.

Your connection to the net consists of the local loop, your ISP and the international connection. The reason we can't get cheap net connection in desiland is because of problems with all these three. Even in the best case, railwire only solves one problem out of three.

DOOMED.

What do you think US sprint is?

Even having a good MAN (not to be confused with homosapien MAN) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...ea_network its a move forward.

Apart from US Sprint, what is Star Service in Singapore .

www.starhub.com/

www.focussingapore.com...arhub.html

I read about above about a year or two back.

Sprint, the long distance company that prided itself over owning an all fibre network? I think you are suggesting that railwire can turn out to be a success like them.
There are various ways where that will not happen:
1. During Sprint's rise, Local loop for voice was a mature market in the US; international connectivity was not a major factor. They made their big bucks doing long distance hauling for their customers in a market with little competition (ATT&MCI). When that was the bulk of profits for a telecom company, Sprint's rise was not a surprise.
2. Sprint's own foray into wired local loop was/is a disaster.
3. They had partial success in wireless, but voice only.

Sprint is struggling now with wireless+internet+everything-that-comes-with-it. It's not clear they will actually survive the next few years. In summary, their fibre optic network helped them grow when voice was the only game in town, had little competition and had a richer customer base. They were also a non-sarkari for-profit company focused on telecom.

Alas, such a set of circumstances is missing for railwire.

To make matters worse, Sprint is probably also DOOMED. So railwire is doubly so.

DOOMED, I say.

Sprit has this neat idea of free unlimited calls all over the country and free roaming so I had them for many years. Then when I cancelled them I asked if I could leave a forwading number like you do for your local land line. And she laughed at me and hung up.

People still had to pay long distance calls to call me because the number was from far away so it was basiclaly useless unless they also had sprint.

Guess they only care when they want customers and I never bothered with anything from them again.

I agree, this project doesn't look very promising. The sad story of Broadband in India is this:
The only technology that is feasible countrywide is DSL. Wimax is a joke, the signal strength is inversely proportional to the square of the distance between the Wimax transmitter and receiver.
Worldwide the most popular tech. is DSL , no other system even comes close.
Now the problem of DSL in india is that the last mile is BSNL's monopoly and it has no competition in most places, Airtel and other pvt players cannot even dream of the scale BSNL operates at .
Unless the last mile is opened up and given to pvt players to share, nobody will offer better price and better service PAN- INDIA other than BSNL.

hi this is thejasreddy.... which company that has taken railwire 32 mbps <-- minor edit -->