Most of us already know this, Internettrafficreport.com has confirmed high bandwidth prices and artificial choking of available capacities make Internet services in India lousy.
According to this Hindu report, India has an overall index of 74 and a response time of 253 milliseconds. The US in comparison has 98 and 13 ms respectively. A higher index indicates a faster and reliable connection. Peru and Mexico fare better in internet connectivity compared to India. However, I checked, and we are marginally better than China (69) and Indonesia (70) and just behind Singapore at (79). Secondly, the router pinged by them is only that of VSNL, which is one of the Internet exchanges in India, so not all hope is lost. You can check out Response times and other India specific details here.
Indian ISP’s are artificial choking capacity inorder to maintain high prices states Chharia, President, Internet Service Providers Association of India (ISPAI). As per the article, smaller ISP’s can’t guarantee quality of service because they can’t afford more bandwidth even if the capacity demands it. We have previously covered Chharia’s comments that the move to cancel district level ISP licenses will hurt small entrepreneurs and consumers. With Bharti laying its own cable, Tata going global with network handshakes and Reliance having FLAG, there is plenty of capacity at the headend, what’s stopping it from becoming cheap are vested interests in keeping the end user price expensive. I compared prices in India vs the UK, a dedicated 2mbps lease line costs approx Rs 50,000 per month in India whereas in the UK, even at its highest, costs approx Rs 40,400 for one year (including Broadband, TV, Phone & Mobile together)!
In case of our wireless hope, according to this Telegraph report, RComm is having troubles rolling out its WiMax services because of spectrum shortage. Reliance currently has 3.3 GHz of spectrum and plans to introduce retail WiMax in 12 cities in the next three months.
Nikhil adds: So now we need a report to tell us that Internet connectivity in India sucks? I think you just have to experience it to know that, and that TRAI’s performance indicators are an eyewash. More than bandwidth choking, at leased on wireline connections, it’s an issue of reliability. I’ve had problems with every connection I’ve taken so far – in chronological order: VSNL, Hotwire, Sify, MTNL, Tata Indicom (wireless) and RCom (Wireless). There’s no consistency, and there’s poor customer service. My MTNL connection has been troublesome for over a week now, and even making a complaint was difficult. No one followed up, and the call centre exec told me to contact the exchange directly since they can’t do anything about it. I spoke to the exchange SDO, and the connection is still not working properly…really, what does one have to do to get a reliable connection in this country?
Comments have been disabled for this post