BSNL traffic crawls through Bharti Infotel gateway

Ironically, BSNL's DataOne broadband internet connections are crawling like dial up connections ever since they announced the revised, high speed plans for the new year. Customers like me are getting frustrated with this miserable speed of 30-70kbps instead of the promised 2mbps, or atleast the good old 256kbps.

Please BSNL, I'm ready to forget everything you ever told about the new 2mbps dream. Just get me the damn 256kbps broadband back!

Strange but here it is, the output of running a traceroute to google.com from my BSNL DataOne connection.

Tracing route to google.com [64.233.187.99]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms 192.168.1.1
2 38 ms 43 ms 41 ms 59.93.0.1
3 95 ms 85 ms 84 ms 218.248.249.25
4 84 ms 84 ms 84 ms 218.248.249.14
5 81 ms 84 ms 82 ms 218.248.255.17
6 85 ms 84 ms 85 ms 218.248.255.18
7 117 ms 116 ms 125 ms 203.101.65.233
8 116 ms 125 ms 112 ms 59.145.6.227
9 113 ms 115 ms 125 ms 203.101.100.221
10 391 ms 384 ms * POS2-2.GW12.NYC4.ALTER.NET [208.192.179.49]
11 387 ms 398 ms 386 ms 0.so-4-0-1.XL3.NYC4.ALTER.NET [152.63.22.78]
12 * 383 ms 385 ms 0.ge-5-0-0.BR2.NYC4.ALTER.NET [152.63.3.126]
13 392 ms 403 ms 392 ms Te-3-4.car1.NewYork1.Level3.net [4.68.110.233]
14 419 ms 394 ms 400 ms ae-1-53.bbr1.NewYork1.Level3.net [4.68.97.65]
15 402 ms 398 ms 403 ms as-3-0.bbr1.Washington1.Level3.net [64.159.3.254]
16 404 ms 400 ms 398 ms ae-11-51.car1.Washington1.Level3.net [4.68.121.18]
17 * 379 ms * GOOGLE-INC.car1.Level3.net [4.79.228.38]
18 383 ms 384 ms 386 ms 72.14.238.136
19 384 ms 385 ms 385 ms 72.14.236.173
20 385 ms 384 ms 387 ms 216.239.49.222
21 386 ms 392 ms 390 ms jc-in-f99.google.com [64.233.187.99]

Trace complete.

The first 6 IPs seem to be okay, its BSNL gates from 2 to 6 and my router on 1. But, the items in boldface, i.e., routers 7, 8 and 9. Do they really belong to BSNL?

I ran a query on APNIC Whois Database (http://wq.apnic.net/apnic-bin/whois.pl/) with the addresses 203.101.65.233, 59.145.6.227 and 203.101.100.221.

They're of Bharti Infotel Ltd. (www.bharti.com). BSNL is tied up with Bharti? I don't remember what the traceroute output was before BSNL's revision announcement and slowdown, but is this a failsafe plan BSNL has taken to keep the network running? Is this what really causing the slowdown?

A week of battle with customer care and telecom staff at my exchange, I find BSNL's customer service stupid and moronic. For 34 hours in last two days my connection was down due to a damned 'PPP authentication failure', good heavens its now vanished somehow. Yet they don't have any, any ANY, explanation for all this. Lack of an alternate ISP in my local area is what keeps me clinging on to this DataOne now.