The latest report from Akamai technologies has revealed that Indian broadband users transmit and receive data at the 2nd lowest speed in Asia. Akamai has set up its data centers in many major countries. Its CDN service is used by many high traffic websites that include Twitter, Bing search engine,…etc. Thus this company has enough data to prove that its report is accurate.
According to the Akamai report, India ranks 118th in the list of countries with the slowest broadband speed. It outranks Indonesia which has a ranking of 122nd. The report is interesting because it has claimed that countries with lower GDP rank better than India.
Population can’t be blamed for this as 70% people in India have not yet used the Internet. As you can see in the below picture, with an average 2 Mbps speed, South Korea tops the list in Akamai report. People in Hong Kong enjoy internet at an average rate of 16 to 17 Mbps.
EDGE or GPRS connection from various Indian telecom operators is dead slow. According to this article published on WiKipedia, the max speed supported by GPRS or EDGE networks is within 48 to 285 KBPS. I’ve used SIM cards from Aircel, Vodafone, Reliance and Idea, i never experienced constant download speed of more than 22 KBPS.
The connection is not stable and sometimes the transfer rate drops to a disappointing 2KBPS. Many companies offer 1GB data plan for a price within 100 to 150 Rs. Even if you’ll keep a 1GB file download active on your handset, computer or a tablet, this FUP limit wouldn’t be reached.
Broadband (3G, 3G+) connections from top companies are lightly expensive and the speed is not satisfactory. I used MTS 3G+ broadband connection that promised 14 MBPS speed. But data transfer rate never surpassed above 3.9 MBPS. Anyways, let’s hope that ranking of India improves in the next report.
