While we are still struggling with a few Kbps speeds, which we call Broadband in India. Korea is already rolling out 1Gbps broadband by investing US$24 Billion.
Most of the internet plans available in India, have a download limits of 1GB and speeds are 256/512Mbps.This defeats the whole purpose of having high speed internet when the moment you start using it, you end up paying for every MB of download.
Airtel which is offering the highest speeds for home use of 8Mbps, has a cap of 4GB, which you can easily use up in about an hour! And BTW Airtel service is available in only select cities and locations, so you are out of luck.
What India needs:
- Active peering between ISPs, most local ISPs don’t connect to each other, so traffic has to go around the world to reach them.
- Fireup the unused fiber. Only 3% of fiber optic cables are actually being used, the rest are sitting idle. Create a law to force people to put this to use within a time frame, else this fiber becomes public property.
- Currently its more expensive to host sites in India, than in the US, because of which most Indian companies have web sites situated in the US. First reduce the cost of hosting in India and second give tax incentive for businesses to host web sites in India.
- Also ISP shouldn’t charge for downloads, if the downloads are from an Indian server. This will encourage people to download from a local server.
- Setup local mirrors of popular software such as Linux flavours.
Hi Prakash,
What are your thoughts on wireless technologies? here in Australia we have the disadvantage of extreme distance and small populations between them, wired services can be expensive.
we know what the landline system there , so perhaps more effort into wireless could be beneficial.
Dallas