This is a part rant, part tip - so bear with me… My broadband connection absolutely sucks over the past week. I upgraded from 2Mbps with a download limit to a 4Mbps with unlimited downloads and since then it has been nothing but trouble… Damn BSNL!! I’ve probably registered about 30 odd complaints with them to no avail. If there was a Nobel for bad customer service, BSNL would probably win it by a mile. Some examples:
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They’ll call to find out what the complaint it and even when I explain what’s happening, they hardly hear me out at all.
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Either they call up and say 'We have fixed it at the Exchange' and nothing has changed
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They automatically close the complaints :)
Guess they find it too troublesome that someone who’s paying for broadband actually expects the said broadband connection to work reliably!
Anyway, Airtel doesn’t seem to be any better - they need 10 days to set up a connection and when I was on the phone with them, they didn’t seem too interested in increasing their customer count by 1 :).
I also tried calling an ISP called YouBroadband after searching some of the Bangalore forums for good ISP providers. They promised a call in 24 hours to confirm if they have coverage in my area and it was feasible for them to set up the connection and that was 48 hours ago!
At work, I’ve heard good things about ACTBroadband and they have some ads in TOI as well, but they said they don’t have coverage in my area :(.
So how do you download
Today I needed to download something and doing it from the browser failed each time since my DSL connection would blink out in between!
After ranting and raving and writing the first part above and still
mentally screaming at BSNL, decided to do something about it… Time for
trusty old wget - surely, it’ll have something?
Turns out that guess was a 100% on the money… it took a few tries experimenting with different options, but finally worked like a charm
wget -t0 --waitretry=5 -c -T5 url
# where
# -t0 - unlimited retries
# --waitretry - seconds to wait between retries
# -c resume partially downloaded files
# -T5 - set all timeouts to 5 seconds. Timeouts here are connect timeout, read timeout and dns timeout