Have we reached a saturation point for broadband speeds in India?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Kyle Crane
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Jio had to, at the end of the day they would like to dominate and I also know Airtel will follow suit maybe already doing. Coz accept it or not, Airfiber is not going to sustain with its all glorified hyped 5G hotspot thing and very limited fooling FUP. Many wants to switch to fiber and so they are doing, now if an industry disrupter will come, then most will switch boats leaving regional players provided the elites match what regional local isps are giving. Its only time.
 
@Kyle Crane
honestly you are right about the speed stagnation but i feel like we are missing the bigger picture of what we actually lost.

think about the pre-jio era we relied on bsnl and local providers mostly on copper cable. sure the speeds were asymmetric like 10mbps down and 2mbps up and the prices were high compared to international standards, but we had a different kind of freedom back then.

if jio didn't come into the picture, we’d likely still be stuck paying high prices for basic copper speeds because who wants to compete when you don't have to? its literally the same situation as the RAM market in 2025 look at the big 3 like samsung, sk hynix, and micron. they could lower prices if they wanted to, but they don't because they only focus on profit margins. that's exactly where the broadband sector is right now.

but the real issue isn't just the speed, its the hidden costs we pay indirectly for this "cheap" fiber. we forget that in exchange for low prices, we got high restrictions like cgnat, no bridge mode, and throttling,bad qos . and yes if your a big techie for sure you can bypass those terms easily but here im talking about most people who dont know yet how to bypass them.

the big providers like jio and airtel and even some big local players in backend they wont use optimal path to go through ur traffic, instead they choose every selected server and go through all the traffic in it. the result is we get high latency in real usage, but they are smart they make some plan specifically for speed test sites where they choose a good path. so that why when u do a speed test u see wow good latency and speed, but in reality u just experienced a vip path for a selected site, not for your actual daily usage.

and honestly most users ignore those cause they saw oh its loading so it might be youtube or faceboook or telegram (whatever the sitethey used) not working properly, they dont realize its the isp issue. compare this to other countries they have very less restriction but in return u get high price to give to the company, not like extra price im talking about there normal price is high but the quality matches. here we pay less, but we pay with our freedom and quality.
 
Smaller ISPs even block ICMP messages so when packet size is large it gets into blackhole and website breaks, faced a lot with telegram, jiotv, vowifi on Jio sim
@markiv Yes, I’ve faced this type of issue too. It doesn’t happen all the time, but when you’re connected to multiple groups and someone shares images or videos, Telegram just keeps loading for 3–5 minutes. Sometimes it eventually loads, and sometimes it gets completely stuck.
 
the big providers like jio and airtel and even some big local players in backend they wont use optimal path to go through ur traffic, instead they choose every selected server and go through all the traffic in it. the result is we get high latency in real usage, but they are smart they make some plan specifically for speed test sites where they choose a good path. so that why when u do a speed test u see wow good latency and speed, but in reality u just experienced a vip path for a selected site, not for your actual daily usage.
That is somewhat true to some extent but for me it has been kinda the opposite. I test on speedtest and the server would have a bit higher latency than the servers I connect to usually or CDNs.

Besides, almost every ISP only cares about what speed you get to their speedtest node which you directly connect to and which is within their own network.
 
Indian consumers are actually smarter than what people give them credit for.
Almost nobody needs speeds more than 100-200 Mbps.2,5,10 Gbps plans available in places like Singapore, EU and Japan are completely pointless for 99.9% of the people.
What needs to be prioritized is:
1. Make WiFi6 equipment mandatory<This also addresses spectrum efficiency besides speed>.Lack of a WiFi6 router is the #1 bottleneck to a quality internet experience.
2. Better network planning so that real speed(not just to local/peered sites) is at least 100 Mbps. This is the #2 bottleneck
3. FUP needs to be increased to at least 10 GB/month OR at least have a data roll over facility with a max cap of 10 GB.
4. Base speed needs to be 100 Mbps. Excitel has already implemented this years ago. This needs to be the minimum speed for a wired
connection to be called a broadband.
@VVER#
Yes, I agree with your point about making Wi-Fi 6 equipment mandatory. If everyone gets Wi-Fi 6 routers, the overall experience will be much better, not just in speed but also in spectrum efficiency and stability. Right now, lack of a good router is a big bottleneck for most users.
But the problem is, telecom operators like Jio, Airtel, and Vi mainly want to use newer spectrum for their own infrastructure. They prefer to buy spectrum through auctions and control it, instead of the government making newer bands freely usable for basic Wi-Fi like 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz. Because of this, ISPs keep giving basic routers, and users don’t get the full benefit even if the internet speed is high. In other countries, the 6 GHz band is free for Wi-Fi, so people can use Wi-Fi 6E / Wi-Fi 7
 
@raj17 i was able to solve jiotv and telegram by reducing ipv6 MTU. No luck with Vowifi on current ISP. now i am behind other ISP to give IPOE with static ip connectivity and eliminate PPPoE and CGNAT all together. that should solve all the issues. none will enable PMTUD and the Mikrotik router is very sensitive to MTU unlike consumer grade routers
 
i have used many broadband services, on today's date i dont find anyone using it, not even airtel. Airtel used to have in in the past not now. DPI needs good hardware and local ISPs lack it. you can use goodbye dpi for it
 
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