When I woke up today, I found my mobile phone wasn’t catching any signal, checked again after an hour or so and saw the same status. Surprised, I restarted my mobile phone, only to get another shock, now I was getting the error, “sim card rejected”.

I tried it on my dad’s phone and got similar error, while his Idea SIM card worked perfectly in my mobile phone. I decided to call Idea customer care (4444) and found no options to reach the customer care, got on their website, found the number of Idea’s Delhi nodal officer and called that number. According to the lady at other end, there was no issue with my connection and probably my sim card had gone bad and needed to be replaced.

Another look at Idea’s website for their local office and I was off to their office in Rajori Garden, though thanks to fantastic directions given on their site, it took me some time to locate the office. Went in and told them about my problem and was asked to submit a copy of my id and Rs. 75 to get the sim replaced.

When I submitted the required document, they had another shock in store for me, it turns out, that submitting documents in 2007 really was a hogwash (Verifying mobile phone subscribers: a whitewash?) and my mobile phone connection was still in name of some one else!

It turned out, the good for nothing Idea Cellular people hadn’t actually made any use of the documents I had submitted to them in January 2007.

Infuriated I asked for an explanation and was offered none, apart from that, maybe Idea Cellular’s Jail Road office failed to submit the documents! Now I would have to once again submit ID proof and photograph and hope that they will get it right, even though they haven’t been able to in the last 5 years that I have had been using this connection for!

Disgusted and without choice, I had no option apart from complying with what they were saying in order to get my mobile phone connection working again, even though I have absolutely zero faith in Idea Mobile Phone company to correct this mistake and make the changes this time around, to ensure I am not faced with situation like this ever again.

Companies like Idea Cellular blame government servants for inefficiency and dereliction of duty, while their own employees are even worse and their management, shady (remember Satyam). At moments like this, I can not help but wonder if it was a good idea to allow private players in the telecoms arena, which can possibly be a national security threat, considering how they are operating.

Based on this experience and the fact that there is virtually no idea mobile phone coverage or even agreement for roaming with other providers in remote areas, I would likely be switching my idea mobile phone connection to another operator, if and when the number portability becomes a reality in India!

Roughly a month ago, I bought a semi-dedicated hosting account with MDDHosting, since I had to move one of my sites (Indiaon2wheels) to another server, because it was consuming too many resources and causing other sites on my servers to slow down.

Due to the amount of traffic Indiaon2wheels was receiving, it was impossible to host it on a normal shared hosting account and I didn’t wanted to get in to the trouble of managing two servers/vps and thus started looking for a powerful shared hosting account. Which could not only handle all the traffic IO2W was receiving at the moment, but also hold up to the expected increase in traffic in the next few months and wouldn’t need all the back end work, which is generally associated with managing and running your own server/vps.

After a lot of researching and reading various reviews, one name came up again and again, MDDHosting. After a couple of email exchange with their sales department, I decided to bit the bullet and went ahead and ordered their semi-dedicated plan.

Account was setup in a jiffy, though dedicated ip allocation took couple of hours to complete. An email to support and IO2W was migrated to the new server and was up and running in a matter of minutes.

Since then I have had no reason to approach the support as the site is running as fast as ever and I haven’t yet experienced any downtime or slowdown (monitored 24/7).

Overall I am quite satisfied with my MDDHosting semi-dedicated account, as it has managed to handle thousands of visitors who daily visit Indiaon2wheels, with aplomb and without even once coming to a crawl.

Hopefully the same would be true a few months down the line as well, when I will post a bit longer term review of their hosting account.

Well my guess was right when I wrote this blog post, Hero Honda Karizma end of life? Hero Honda is now planning to launch the new version of the Hero Honda Karizma.

While there are no details yet on what all updates and upgrades the new Karizma would likely receive, I would expect this upgrade to be a substantial one, especially after Bajaj Auto recently launched their new Bajaj Pulsar 220 DTSi.

I just hope that Hero Honda doesn’t compromises on touring character of Karizma, in order to make it perform slightly better in city.

In its current form the Karizma is just perfect for touring in India, slightly better and tougher plastic parts, inclusion of a more powerful headlight, a bit better mileage, maybe even switching to fuel injection and of course more power would make it an even more formidable touring machine.