CNN-IBN has a show where consumers can contact them about service related issues and they'll follow it up. The first report was about Tata Indicom and somebody kindly put it up on YouTube ...

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MTNL in association with Aksh Optifibre today announced the launch of India’s first legal and cheapest Voice over Internet Protocol (VOIP) services in Mumbai. The service will enable MTNL broadband subscribers to call US, UK, Canada and Australia at rates as low as Rs 1 per minute changing the voice calling experience forever.

You Telecom, formerly known as Iqara, is reportedly planning to expand its broadband business.

You Telecom, a Citigroup-owned broadband service provider, plans to spend Rs 300 crore for launching services in 14 new cities across the country by the end of 2008.

A columnist, Prashant Rao, for the Indian Express expresses his frustration at the broadband scene in India.

So what is preventing broadband from getting into single, forget double, digits? The answer my friend is blowing in the wind, heck, it’s shouting in a gale of indifference on part of ISPs.

The Indian government's new ISP policy has done away with category C licenses for ISPs, according to the Times of India, because they are a burden to the regulator, pose a potential national security threat, and are a risk to consumers.

For those interested, I've updated and revamped the global comparison list.

The DoT is expected to introduce regulations that will open up access to landing stations of international long distance players for rival companies’ submarine cables.

Currently, Videsh Sanchar Nigam Ltd, Reliance Communications, Bharti and Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd carry bandwidth to India through seven locations. Trai had recommended to the DoT to allow equal access at the cable landing stations (CLS), including landing facilities for submarine cables, to licensed operators on a non-discriminatory basis, without any sunset clause.

The Economic Times confirms that the DoT has ordered ISPs to only block the blogs in question rather than entire domains or IP addresses.

DoT has also issued a show cause notice to ISPs following pressure from the government. “The DoT has further sought explanation from the erring ISPs as to why action be not taken against them for blocking unintended websites and webpages,” a government notice on the issue said.

This page exists because of this story.

• Coral Cache: To access (for e.g.) http://mumbaihelp.blogspot.com/, modify the URL to http://mumbaihelp.blogspot.com.nyud.net:8080. Similarly, to access a page like http://mumbaihelp.blogspot.com/2006/07/how-can-we-help-you.html, change the URL to http://mumbaihelp.blogspot.com.nyud.net:8080/2006/07/how-can-we-help-you.html. So, it's just a question of inserting the string .nyud.net:8080 immediately after the hostname.
  

It appears that ISPs all across India have been ordered by the Indian government to block a number of key websites on the Internet.

ISPs are believed to have been asked to block sites like bloodspot.com, hinduhumanrights.org, hinduuni-ty.org and clickatell.com, besides frontline blogs like the Google-owned blogsp-ot.com. Deepak Maheshwari, secretary of ISP Association of India said: “We have received a letter from DoT, asking us to block around 18 URLs.”

Though the communication, dated July 13, by the telcom department to ISPs lists specific pages/ websites, several ISPs have blocked all blogs because they were not equipped to filter specific pages. This could be because all websites hosted on blogspot.com, for instance, have the same IP address.

Officials defended the decision saying, "We would like those people to come forward who access these (the 12) radical websites and please explain to us what are they missing from their lives in the absence of these sites."