Click Image for Broadband/Mobile Plan/DTH Comparison Page
The broadband speed in India starts at 256kpbs as per the directives of the Department of Telecom, Government of India. Two years have passed since the Indian Government declared 2007 as the year of broadband in India, but broadband users in India are still confused about the speed and other technicalities of our “High Speed Internet” or “Broadband Connection”. With many ISP’s (Internet service providers) offering various speeds on many connections with numerous tariff packages, it is often confusing and difficult for a customer to choose a broadband connection in India.
Few parameters about high-speed Internet Broadband in India:
1. The plight of kilo bits per second and kilo bytes per second
Though it has been defined by the Government of India that, any internet connection in India can be classified or defined as broadband connectivity when it has a minimum speed of 256kbps (kilo bits per second). Many of us fail to notice that 256kbps is actually 32KBps (Kilo Byte per second). So when we download a file and notice a download speed of say 28KBps (Normally all download indicators display in KBps i.e. Kilo Bytes per second), we are getting 224kbps (kilo bits per second) which is close to 256kbps of our actual broadband connectivity.
Not many people are aware about the difference between Kilo Bits and Kilo Bytes ( 1 Byte = 8bits) and compare their broadband connection speed with download speeds shown by various download software available online or on the hard drives.
2. Contention ratio or 1:1, 1:4 Shared broadband connection
Contention ratio is defined by TRAI (Telecom Regulatory Authority of India) in simple terms as the number of subscribers sharing the same bandwidth capacity. For example, if there is a 2 mbps broadband connection available with an ISP and the ISP gives 4 broadband internet connections, the ISP will still promote it as a 2mbps connection to all the 4 subscribers, but the contention ratio would be 1:4. The bottom line is, as a broadband connection user, if you have 2mbps connection with a 1:4 contention ratio, your chances of getting the whole 2 mbps bandwidth is when the other 3 users are not using the broadband connection.
Besides ISPs have their pricing strategies accordingly and charge one fourth for a 1:4, 2 mbps broadband internet connection as compared to a 1:1, 2 mbps connection.
3. Upload Speed, Download speed and fair usage Policy
By default, the connection speed of any Internet connection, broadband or otherwise, specifies the download to a computer speed, not the upload from a computer speed. So, many people may not be aware of throughput of a broadband internet connection. For a 256kbps connection, if it has both upload and download speed of 256kbps, the through put of that connection would be 512kbps, but does one get that throughput?
Now a day, maximum broadband connections are offered using a DSL modem. The good thing about a DSL modem is, while it has high download speeds, it has a lower upload speed, which minimizes the throughput of the Internet connections. When ISPs introduced unlimited download for a few broadband connection schemes which had a contention ratio of 1:4 or more, one or two among those 4 subscribers started consuming the whole bandwidth while the remaining two could not avail their fair share of Internet usage. So ISPs came out with the concept of fair Usage Policy which created quite a controversy recently in India.
These few interesting facts might become useful in the context of your visit to Aajkideals.com while deciding what kind of tariff one chooses for a broadband connection in India as well as what kind of service he may expect from the ISP (Internet Service Provider) in India. Thus as aptly mentioned above, its more than just a price comparison and the Indian Broadband User needs to read between the lines and do a fair service and technical analysis of the given broadband plan and the Internet Service Provider.
Uttam Pegu
Related posts: