Why FTTH speeds are not growing in India

[Kyle Crane]

Since the launch of Airtel Xstream Fiber and Jio Fiber in 2019, we have not seen any changes in FTTH speeds on both the giant players
1gbps still costs above 3000Rs a month and gives a 3.3 TB limit



Only Local ISPs are pushing higher speeds as much as they can since they want to attract customers
Example: Excitel ,Vortex Netsol ,ACT Fibernet in pune etc

And some local ISPs providing 300mbps under 1000rs is not hard to find, since those are shared bandwidth

In my findings, the Fibre cables themselves don't exactly have a speed limit, it's just that it requires higher-end network switches and more backhaul capacity to increase speeds on FTTH*

A newer 10Gbps network switch and a higher-speed backhaul would be costly, and the returns would be quite low, similar to what we have now. Not to mention the need to change the router on the customer's end, too.

Avg broadband speed in India is 60-70Mbps ,meaning the majority of home broadband consumers are on a 30-40mbps plan , while some have shifted to 100mbps plans. Only those with Excitel ,Vortex Netsol ,ACT Fibernet in pune etc or some LOCAL ISP have a connection speed higher than 100mbps




source :
Source

All in all we would see speed increase, but that is really far away for now

 

[securetty]

The average Indian broadband user is stuck with 40-70 Mbps plans not because of infrastructure limitations. We’ve had fiber in the ground for years now that can easily support 1 Gbps and beyond. The real issue is that Airtel and Jio are actively milking these low speed plans because it's more profitable to upsell bandwidth-starved users than to actually improve base plans. Textbook market stagnation

We shouldn't really forget that the government talks big about "Digital India" but in reality there’s no push for enforcing minimum speed standards, no funding to modernize last-mile infrastructure and no regulation to break the Airtel-Jio duopoly. As long as they pay lip service to connectivity while letting telcos call the shots nothing changes

Bottom line: Until there's either (1) real competition in more areas or (2) policy that forces incumbents to improve pricing and speeds, big telcos will keep serving the same recycled plans from 2019 and we'll all keep overpaying for underwhelming service.

At least we're better off than Germany I guess... spent a few months there and it was mind boggling how grimly priced their plans were with the speeds offered. Even neighbors like France, Poland, etc have it great even for the price.

 

[Skye]

I think this is mostly because most people are fine with 30 to 50 Mbps plan. There are very few people here who care about high speed plans, so ISPs simply don't think it is worth having higher speed plans or making existing plans cheaper.

I know my tier 3 experience doesn't matter, but nobody I know in real life uses anything more than the 30-50 Mbps (lowest) plan of their ISP. I was even told that I am wasting my money when some people got to know I am having 100Mbps plan (RailWire days).

 

[Mota Bhai]

For majority of the Indian consumers 30 or 40 mbps speed is good enough, internet for them is all about using social media apps only. Plus with the advent of the 5G unlimited packs many consumers don't even want a broadband connection unless they get like OTT or DTH bundled with their broadband plans.

 

[TungaBunga]

The average consumer (Which is like 99% of the population) doesn't even need more than 30-40 Mbps AND is okay with added latency of AirFiber compared to wired broadband.
Secondly for Optical fiber (FTTH), not AirFiber there needs to be larger optic Fiber cable network established.
The ISPs that we have are primarily telco operators and broadband services are secondary for most. Their primary reason for pushing for AirFiber instead of proper FTTH is just combination of all 3 that I said above..
No requirement of speed, having 5G expansion compliment AirFiber, less work to lay down FTTH connections.
Sad but true.

 

[Deleted member 87056]

I think upload and download speed is not the sole criteria to judge the capability of a connection. You just can't compare a 300Mbps connection from ISPs like excitel or hathway to Airtel or Tata Play. In my experience, a 50Mbps Airtel Fiber/Tata Play Fiber connection would perform much better than a 200 Mbps excitel connection in terms of ping, routing and streaming. I am not talking about raw download speeds here.
link
Go through the above article, even Netflix says 15 Mbps in more than enough to stream 4K content.
ISPs like hathway and excitel don't give the promised plan speed outside their peering network. That is something very important to note here.
An average household just wants to download whatsapp media, stream content over YT, netflix and other OTTs and basic WFH. I think a 100 Mbps connection is more than enough to handle this kind of use case.

If someone really needs higher download speeds, they always have an option to move to 300 or 500 Mbps plan.
I remember geekyranjit uploading a video where in he downgraded his jio fiber connection from 500 Mbps to 30 Mbps and nobody noticed the drop in speed in his household.

The thing is, no client can utilize those high download and upload speeds for regular usage.
Back in the days, ACT used to offer a booster voucher kind of a thing where you can upgrade your plan to 500 Mbps for a couple of days if you need to download a heavy game or file. I am not sure if they offer it now.

ISPs should focus on high uptime, better routing and reduced latency so that the end user has a good experience. This is the only reason I always opt connection from Airtel, Tata Play or ACT because they have their routing and latency sorted out. I had a good experience using all the 3 ISPs in the past in this aspect. Nothing much to complain from that department. Uptime varies from city to city and area to area.

 

[Lucifer96]

I think Pings and latency matters more than simply increasing the speed, cause that will directly translate to better user experience for a majority.

 

[Rickysin]

@87056 have you used excitel or netplus fiber ? i have used both and latency and loading speeds are much much better than airtel or jio. And yes their routing is also much better than airtel/jio.

bufferbloat test without any Qos was A+ on excitel and A on airtel and B on jio.

 

[Deleted member 87056]

No idea about netplus fiber but I have used excitel for a couple of days at a friend's house. In my experience, Airtel, TPF or ACT provide much better internet experience than excitel. I didn't get to play games but my friend gets a ping of 35ms to valorant mumbai server from bangalore(on excitel) while I used to get 17-20ms on ACT, similar ping on Airtel as well, from bangalore. This was last year.
I am not comparing it with Jio, never used Jio Fiber.

 

[Chip]

Firstly remember India is a very price sensitive market with what I called an artificial scarcity of bandwidth created solely by providers to maintain current prices.

Large Cos like Tata/VSNL, Jio and Airtel (BSNL is a gone case) are backbone providers with large funds but remember they have other commitments too with Airtel and Jio falling over themselves to increase mobile subscribers and manage churn.

But the fact is that people simply do NOT need very fast internet. A normal household of 4 can do very well with a 40-50 Mbps fibre connection. Web browsing itself doesnt take much bandwidth. The real bandwidth hogs are only OTT and downloading. The latter is rare in Indian households.

Indians also dont like to spend more than 1000/month incl. tax on broadband and this money can buy you a a 100 Mbps connection. Guess what? I was on 300 Mbps plans from both Tata and Airtel for many years. I downgraded to 100 Mbps as an experiment and hey presto, I barely notice the difference. Yes P2P is slower but who cares? I just leave it in the background and let it do its thing. We use multiple TV sets each streaming 4K content. No difference at all.

Given this there's literally no business case for Providers to upgrade their infra for 1, 2 Gbps or higher connections. The volumes market doesnt exist at that tier with only a few opting for it. Take the case of 1 gig...how many of us enthusiasts have it? I did..gave it up as it doesnt make $$ sense to me. We on this forum are more or less power users compared to normal household users. And if people like us IBF members do not opt for 1 G where is the market for 1.5, 2 and beyond?

Most common bandwidth demand in my housing colony is 100 Mbps and that too homes with kids including teens accessing OTT and doing their thing on YT etc. In fact I take pains to tell them anything more is overkill. As I found out for myself.

I value stability, QoS and uptime more than sheer speed now with free OTT channels thrown in by the providers being the icing on the cake.