I feel a little bit obligated to jump in here (even if I'm late)
I have just two, which I think most will agree upon:
1) More speed for less bucks
2) To hell with FUPs.
When International Bandwidth prices go down, FUPs will be easier to be rid of.
Suggestions:
1. ISPs (both private and govt) should form a "conglomerate" or "consortium" to combine their funds to build nationwide "community" FTTH network for urban areas and wirless (WiMax etc) for rural areas. This way the costs will be shared and rollouts will be faster. Then any ISP can provide service to user who chooses them (like self-unbundling of the local loop). If a new ISP comes along and want to use their lines then they can charge a percentage.
So pretty much like every other country has. The problem isn't *really* last mile -
Tata, Reliance et all have that fairly well covered (for the most part), but the international supply is choked by cost. I think reducing the cost by 75% would cause me to jump for joy - I would be able to provide fully unlimited connections with far less issue.
2. Make peering (inter-ISP traffic) totally free of charges for uploads/downloads between different ISPs, so that traffic inside India becomes super cheap and lessens the load on international links. Get rid of NIXI whoever they are (govt or private) entity because they are part of the problem and not the solution.
NIXI needs to be there, and should remain, although the structure and the costs should definitely change. The peering is actually charged by the ISP to NIXI and vice versa: NIXI is more or less an intermediary who does all the accounting. Instead of charging per GB as they do now, they should charge a flat-rate. Unfortunately, if I'm to believe what I read, the big-3 "created" this per-GB cost for a reason.
3. Govt agencies (
DoT, MRTPC, TDSAT, TRAI etc) should seriously investigate and take action whether private operators who own the international links are not intentionally keeping speeds low and prices high. Basically act on the bandwidth cartel if any.
This I agree with. As I've often said - why does Pakistan have higher-speed internet than we do??
With steps such as these can we subscribers start to get very high speeds at affordable rates with no FUPs/data caps etc...
With all that said, the international stance is such that most countries now have got FUPs or Data Caps in place, and I expect that such a trend would remain. What I would hope to change, however, is that the FUPs and/or Data Caps would be increased to such a level that very few people would even notice. Instead of being 20, 50 or even 100GB, it could be 100, 300 or 500GB depending on the level of service.
More than this I think and it becomes somewhat apparent that there is either:
Several users at your home, each consuming large amounts of bandwidth (ideal situation)
Commercial use
Large amounts of piracy
This is one reason why I would propose something whereby users can download movies for something like Rs20 each, and the bandwidth is "free".
ban deep packet inspection and force the govt to show warrant if it wants someone to be tapped and oh one more thing.
respect net neutrality,dont ban p2p or throttle it.
This is something that would need to be taken up with the copyright holders. As the law stands now, basically copying of foreign content is OK, copying of domestic (Indian) content is not OK.
As far as I know, P2P is not yet being throttled by any Indian ISPs, [though I am not sure], anyways, I personally feel that :
(1) The minimum limit for defining a connection as "Broadband" which is currently 256 Kbps should be increased to atleast 1Mbps. The world is now moving on to Gbps connection and we are still stuck on Kbps.
TRAI has already proposed an increase of the minimum broadband speed to 2Mbits. We won't be offering less than this speed at all.
(2) Do away with Fair Usage Policy. If Fair Usage Policy is implemented, then the unlimited plans are no more "truly unlimited".
This is an international trend, and also something which is currently necessary due to the costs of an international circuit at the moment.
(3) Offer Hi-Speed plans at cheap prices.
I'm working on it. Plan to inaugerate the service 1.1.2010, trials in Mumbai in Nov/Dec '09.
1) The minimum limit for defining a connection as "Broadband" which is currently 256 Kbps should be increased to atleast 1Mbps. The world is now moving on to Gbps connection and we are still stuck on Kbps.(2) Do away with Fair Usage Policy. If Fair Usage Policy is implemented, then the unlimited plans are no more "truly unlimited".(3) Offer Hi-Speed plans at cheap prices.
