Do you get what you pay for from your broadband connection? India recently announced an ambitious National Broadband Plan, with a recommended expenditure of $6 billion to set up a ‘National Broadband Network.' But what is the state of the existing broadband services, in speed and quality, offered by various Internet Service Providers?
According to a study done jointly by LIRNEasia, an ICT policy and regulation think-tank active across the Asia Pacific, and IIT-Madras, a majority of broadband packages offered in India fail to deliver even 80 per cent of the advertised speeds. The worst case of non-compliance was Airtel's 2 Mbps plan in Mumbai, which did not deliver even 20 per cent of what it promised. Airtel has refused to comment on the results of any “independent study.”
“While underlying technologies of the different packages would most certainly impact the performance, this test focused on the comparison between what is advertised and the actual speeds delivered by the operators,” says Shazna Zuhyle, research manager, LIRNEasia.
In the local versus global scenario, “the kbps per dollar value users get in the West is much better,” Ms. Zuhyle adds.
The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India has defined broadband as any connectivity delivered to the user at a bandwidth greater than 256 kbps. This is considerably lower than global standards, especially when compared with the average download speed of 5.1 Mbps offered in the United States.
Owing to the high cost per kilobyte and operators not delivering on promised access speeds, broadband penetration in the country has remained woefully low, covering a mere 0.8 per cent of the population.
Bhaskar Ramamurthi, Director, Centre of Excellence in Wireless Technology at the IIT-Madras, says the speeds that ISPs advertise are mostly the speed on the link loop up to the ‘local exchange.' “Much of the server requests from India are usually going abroad. Even if you send something to a friend in India, it is routed through a server in the U.S. Most of the world's data centres that run the Internet are in the U.S.”
The amount of bandwidth (throughput) available on undersea cables is an important parameter, and buying submarine cable bandwidth is the dominant cost to the operator, he says. The ‘local speed' is not really relevant on the World Wide Web. Since the operator does not want to spend a lot on the bandwidth, too many requests are multiplexed on to the limited bandwidth which chokes the line.
Besides, the Internet is a complicated network; the speed of traffic depends on the weakest link. Most ISPs advertise by prefixing an ‘up to' before the speed. Mr. Ramamurthi says that if a network has to cater to the data traffic of 2 Mbps, it has to have a capacity of 8 Mbps to handle distributed requests. “But most Indian operators promise 2 Mbps speed on a 2 Mbps-capacity line. A framework that will allow customers to measure the quality of service they get has to be evolved to tackle this problem.”
International telephony treaties have also ensured that if users from India access a server in the U.S., they pay for the bandwidth. “This is the present world order. One of the first advantages of the Google model is that you pay to access it,” according to Mr. Ramamurthi.
According to him, comprehensive tests that enable regulators to promote transparency, boost competition and improve service quality must be frequently undertaken.
BSNL Chennai Telephones Chief General Manager A. Subramanian says speed compliance on fixed lines is generally higher than wireless services. However, “when the number of users goes up in the international pipeline, bandwidth is usually throttled.”
S.K. Gupta, Advisor (CN & IT), TRAI, has said the definition of broadband will be modified to include only those services that offer access speeds of 512 kbps from January 1, 2011. “This will be further upgraded to 2 Mbps network speeds from January 1, 2015. A comprehensive regulation on Quality of Service is also in the pipeline.”
