Om Malik reports on the ongoing broadband price war in India, where $8 a month can get you a basic 256 kbps service from Bharti Telecom (still nothing compared to the French broadband bonanza that was discussed previously here, but cheaper than Indian incumbents BSNL and MTNL).  The original story appeared on the Times of India, and is worth reading.

The part of Om's blog entry that I found interesting was his comment on how difficult it was to get a phone line in the old days (often entailing bribes).  Well, my experience growing up in Brazil was not much different: getting a line from TELESP in the good old days was very, very difficult, and the wait was enormous (baksheesh in India was better, because at least that is a bit faster - in São Paulo, there were bribes and on top of that, there were middlemen... really, there were "brokers" who got into the game and used to charge extra bribes supposedly for faster turnaround times).  Of course, this was way back in the late 70's-early 80's and many years before Telefonica entered the market.