Come 1 October, over one crore BSNL landline broadband users ‘will be able to surf the Internet at a minimum speed of 2 megabits per second (2Mbps), at no extra cost.’ At least that’s what Union Telecom Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad would have us believe.
At present, the company offers minimum broadband speed of 512 Kbps.
Announcing this the BSNL CMD, Anupam Shrivastava had said earlier this month,
“We have increased the internet speed four times…we have ensured 2 Mbps is available at last mile, which is the customer premises starting 1 October.”
For internet users, India’s government-owned BSNL’s decision to increase its broadband speed has come too late. Even Bangladesh rolled out 2 Mbps broadband speed three months before its ‘more tech savvy and giant’ neighbour when Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission or BTRC decided to upgrade its broadband speed to 5 Mbps.
Bngladesh, which had set the minimum speed for broadband at 128Kbps in 2008, had then upgraded the minimum broadband speed to 1Mbps in 2013.
Meanwhile, according to a new report by content delivery network firm Akamai, in the first quarter of 2015, the average broadband speed in India was slower than that of Sri Lanka.
In Sri Lanka at least 65% Internet users enjoyed the minimum speed of 4 Mbps while the population who used broadband speed above 4 Mbps was just 9%.
However, the report on the population using Internet speed at more than 10 Mbps had shocking revelation for India. According to the report, while in countries like South Korea, Japan and Hong Kong more than 50 percent internet users enjoyed the broadband speed above 10 Mbps, in India the number stood at poor 1.8 percent painting the sorry picture of broadband speed in India.
