Online Trading woes in India

Online trading advertisements seem to have increased in the Indian marketspace following the current boom.

However my personal experience and information from friends seems to suggest that most of these online trading portals are nothing but a bunch of crap.
I personally use Kotakstreet.com. I chose it as it had a webbased as well as a client interface for trading.

As a friend of mine Krishnan Iyer says, with the stock market boom the trading websites usually go bust. Reaching the main homepage of the sites is not an issue. But using their trading interfaces is a challenge as they either time out, or just don't respond.

Interestingly most of these companies when they approach you to get on to their so callled trading site prefer to demo their site when the market is not trading, like on a saturday or on the weekdays after trading hours. Obviously cause they don't want you to see how pathetic their online or client software is.

It's kind of frustrating, especially for a person like me who uses a 512Kbps link to the internet. I guess for the people using dial up lines the pain is worse.

On the same note another interesting phenomena is the diffferent values of scrips on different T.V. Channels. Say for instance Cipla is trading at 300 on CNBC, it will show up as 301 on NDTV.
Same the story with these websites on ShareKhan.com it might show the price as x and on kotak it will show it as y adding to the confusion of the small trader.

What could be a solution is that you purchase a feed directly of the exchange. This however would be at a hefty price. I hope there is an alternate solution to this issue or a reliable trading site. Would love to hear your experiences.

-Sanjay Shetty