A discussion on poor internet speeds and awful broadband plans in India

[KurianOfBorg]

What are you doing in America to have to install what looks like a very long term Internet connection?

 

[mgcarley]

What are you doing in America to have to install what looks like a very long term Internet connection?

Yes, it will be a long term connection - they want a 5 year contract.

 

[KurianOfBorg]

Yes, it will be a long term connection - they want a 5 year contract.

You didn't really answer the question.

 

[mgcarley]

You didn't really answer the question.

That was intentional.

 

[KurianOfBorg]

That was intentional.

I know. But since you used "connection" as a verb instead of a noun, I felt there might have been a slight chance you were reading it on a mobile device and didn't see entire post clearly.
Did you just edit the post an add an "a"? It's a noun now.

 

[mgcarley]

I know. But since you used "connection" as a verb instead of a noun, I felt there might have been a slight chance you were reading it on a mobile device and didn't see entire post clearly. Did you just edit the post an add an "a"? It's a noun now.

Yes, I made a grammatical error in my original post. My bad.

 

---

[OneWithTheForce]

[color=rgb(40,40,40);font-family:'Droid Sans', helvetica, arial, sans-serif;]The Indian government has direct access to fiber cables in India as well. They require every ISP to have a 10sqft room in the NOC which is not accessible to employees of the ISP containing the required equipment, and the access is not allowed to be slowed down or filtered - so I can't just put a 2 meg pipe in to that room, it has to be 100mb or 1ge or 10ge or whatever my backbone is.[/color]

[color=rgb(40,40,40);font-family:'Droid Sans', helvetica, arial, sans-serif;]Also, the NSA just built a shiny new data centre. They have enough space now.[/color]

Maybe,but whether the Indian government can put that information to use is another matter. Just having access to data does not mean that you can use it efficiently. If you've heard about how they dealt with the 26/11 attacks,you'd know.
I don't know anything special about data usage in India,but I think you're being naive. I remember BSNL having to scrap their high speed 3G plans at first,since some users downloaded close to a terabyte. I think a lack of things to download or not enough hdd space is hardly a problem for most people.

Aren't most servers based in the U.S? So isn't it logical to think that even if they have absolute crap latency that they'll be better of than us. Youtube,for example.
I've seen a lot of Americans/Europeans on gaming servers,forums and what not,and the minimum speed they usually have is around 10-20 mbps. I've had quite a lot of people laugh at my "third world speed and latency",so I find it hard to believe that they're not much better of than me.

 

[mgcarley]

Maybe,but whether the Indian government can put that information to use is another matter. Just having access to data does not mean that you can use it efficiently. If you've heard about how they dealt with the 26/11 attacks,you'd know.

I was there at the time. I'm not exactly fresh off the boat.

I don't know anything special about data usage in India,but I think you're being naive. I remember BSNL having to scrap their high speed 3G plans at first,since some users downloaded close to a terabyte. I think a lack of things to download or not enough hdd space is hardly a problem for most people.

If "most people" included only power users, yes, you'd be right. However, "most people" buy the cheapest device they can, and meaning they've got maybe 300GB of space without anything else being installed. Yes, there are those of us with an extra 1 or 2TB external drive but they're not as common as you might imagine. People with like 50TB RAID-1 NASes are even less common.More to the point, however, of course they would have to scrap those plans because it's wireless and wireless just isn't good for solid streams - it's a finicky bitch at the best of times, which only really makes it good for bursty traffic when it's needed.And 3G in India only means a maximum of 3.6mbit/s or 7.2mbit/s which is a minimal improvement over the wired options (yes, I am aware of the claims of 21 & 28mbit/s networks from Reliance and so on but even then who has a 3G device capable of that speed? People with the Samsung Galaxy SIII and S4 maybe, and not many others).Moreover, that would have been less a question of actual usage than one of reliability: the base-stations reset themselves a lot because the CPUs got overloaded. Wired, however, can handle a hell of a lot more traffic.

Aren't most servers based in the U.S? So isn't it logical to think that even if they have absolute crap latency that they'll be better of than us. Youtube,for example.

Yes, there are a lot of servers in the US. As it concerns India, this is due to a historical lack of decent data centres at reasonable prices in the country. This is changing (slowly).Youtube on the other hand, no. Big sites like that use content-distribution networks. Google has facilities in Mumbai, Delhi, Bangalore and Chennai at least and I have a feeling Hyderabad as well which distribute content from the Google network. There may be other cities where Google has a presence but I can't remember. My latency in Mumbai to anything on Google's AS (discounting if I ping a specific server in a specific location) averages 3 milliseconds, which would make it impossible for Google/Youtube and related services, as seen from my connection, to be in the United States. Rendering this pretty irrelevent.Google isn't the only one, of course.

I've seen a lot of Americans/Europeans on gaming servers,forums and what not,and the minimum speed they usually have is around 10-20 mbps. I've had quite a lot of people laugh at my "third world speed and latency",so I find it hard to believe that they're not much better of than me.

There are numerous reasons why they have 10-20mbit/s and you don't.Firstly, almost every country in Europe has unbundled access. This means that any provider can provide their service over the same infrastructure, irrespective of who built or owns it. In many cases, the government is the one that built the lines to begin with.This is not true in India (yes, there are cablewalas who offer several different ISPs on their same lines but they may have a certain provider because that provider offers them a good rate, or they may not have a certain provider because the provider didn't offer them a good rate or because they have a history with someone at the provider and they don't like that person and so on).This is also not true in America - if I live in an area controlled by Comcast, I can't get access from Time Warner, for example. *MOST* DSL lines in the US offer 1.5 to 6mbit/s (irrespective of provider), but those who game understand that the latency on DSL isn't going to be as good, so typically they'll opt for cable (DOCSIS 2 or 3 usually, not this FTTB stuff that you get in India).Which is where the difference in attitude comes in to play: in India they all want to provide as little as possible for as low cost as possible, whereas in the US, the attitude is different. Not necessarily due to competition, but in part because the cable companies are trying to cram as much TV (and now, HDTV) down the pipes as possible which requires a certain amount of bandwidth to be available.They also understand that linear pricing (1mbit/s for Rs500, 2mbit/s for Rs1000 etc) is stupid, and to get consumers to subscribe to the higher tiers, you have to offer them substantial incentive to do so - like 5mbit/s for $10, 20mbit/s for $25, 50mbit/s for $50 or whatever (yes, I just made those up).It should also be noted that in many cases it can be damned difficult to get Internet just by itself - often you'll have to get phone and/or TV as a bundle (known as double-play or triple-play), which is a relatively unknown phenomenon in India, in part because of the way the licensing for these things works.

 

[ChairmanSaab]

So, have you guys come to a conclusion yet ?
EDIT: Mgcarley, what do you eat man ?

 

[OneWithTheForce]

I was there at the time. I'm not exactly fresh off the boat.

I didn't say you were. Just merely pointing out the fact that even when faced with a threat to national security and a mounting death toll,the Indian government had trouble tapping into the phones of the terrorists. Imagining the same people spying on my email and every other piece of data I consume on the internet,just cracks me up

And about the servers located in India,I know very little about it. But I thought that most local servers don't actually host any content. For example with youtube,the actual cache/video is only available on their North American and European servers.
I guess the lack of any good infrastructure is a big problem here. Proper planning is something we lack on the whole,and that's not just with broadband.