Why FTTH speeds are not growing in India

[thatayush]

@f0r3he4d if it's packet loss only to cloudflare then you should possibly check against some more known ips that are stable in your region. Feel free to rent a vps for this matter.

CloudFlare doesn't host game servers so it doesn't matter in that case.

As for routing issues: feel free to raise this but don't expect resolution anytime soon (maybe if you're lucky, 6 months is your TAT). Being an LCO ipv6 PD's routing was fucked for the entire local exchange, and it took them 5 months to figure it out. The funniest part is only the Bengaluru team handles ipv6 complaints in the south.

 

[sloj]

@f0r3he4d You are mixing up things. DNS and video games are separate. Though DNS and games both use TCP and UDP. You also said the packet loss issue is with cloudflare only so that won't affect gaming as @thatayush said because most game servers are on AWS if I am not wrong.

For packet loss, you can use packetlosstest.com or other such sites to check whether you get packet loss. You can even try speed.cloudflare.com to see if you get any packet loss which will use cloudflare's server to test.

I suggested you to use BIND or termux because the command does work and gives an output.

 

[Rickysin]

i apologize guys! Excitel has started giving me issues. Low speed though speedtest shows full speed.
Speeds do not go above 100 mbps on youtube, 170-180 on fast and on aws hosted files its just 60-70 mbps. I am on 300 mbps plan btw.

Additionally pings are fluctuating a lot like its 10 ms on cloudflare and then boom 70-80 ms. same with google.

 

[Deleted member 87056]

That's what I said, excitel doesn't perform well outside their peering network, just like local ISPs.

 

[f0r3he4d]

I dont play multiplayer games so it wouldnt bother me neither can i check but a majority chunk of websites are under cloudflare CDNs. So bsnl is really punishing you for accessing a large part of the internet. Considering they are a "Tier A" ISP and charge me 2200 a month for their services it doesnt sit well. Only BSNL and Alliance have laid fiber in my area so i use them both if this wasn't the case i wouldnt have been using their services. Plus even their LCOs have seemed to picked up on the babu culture if i get any issues with the internet he literally leaves me on seen.

 

[Rickysin]

@87056 it was working fine couple of days back. One rain and everything messed up.
interestingly last year were rains as well but did not face any issue.

 

[thatayush]

@f0r3he4d download the bsnl selfcare app and raise a request from there. This is notified to a lot of people in any region, so unless they're in the business together of closing requests without noting the concern then you're out of luck.

Sometimes they may close the request so that the LCO doesn't lose money (x number of days a request is open = x% loss from monthly revenue, don't remember the exact numbers) but you can stay in touch with your area's people to get this issue resolved.

 

[Anurag Bhatia]

Hi @Rickysin

@Anurag Bhatia i see that everybody is bashing excitel. Can you share any aws or high peer urls so that i can test it myself on my excitel connection ?

I did it against my own S3 account and tested it for Mumbai because I saw Excitel learning AWS Mumbai routes right in Delhi peering. I cannot put a public link for AWS's egress pricing of $0.10 / 8Rs/GB egress.

Try testing it against my CDN - will come for you via cache in Contabo Mumbai when accessing from India. Excitel might get over peering in Extreme IX Mumbai or via their transit:

http://cdn.anuragbhatia.com/public-share/2025/08/output_1GB_file.bin (1GB)

(Note: Will remove this link after one week of this post)

That's what I said, excitel doesn't perform well outside their peering network, just like local ISPs.

@87056 That might be true for large cities where they feed their LCOs over dark fibre. When I tested their 400Mbps in Rohtak, Haryana it was not going beyond 30-40Mbps for most part even on peered links. I think bottleneck wasn't transit but NLD circuit.

Which is the thing I was trying to convey to keep Excitel out of discussion. One cannot project Excitel as ideal model. Coverage wise they are doing great with very deep penetration via LCO and even service wise they are good. But claim that it's way more bandwidth for lower price than competition is not correct. It's true only if people don't actually need that bandwidth and happy with speedtest results (which surprisingly a lot of people do!).

 

[VVER#]

I think excitel services varies widely but in New Delhi its awesome.I had it for sometime..400 mbps plan.Otherthan speedtest fast.com(netflix server),Youtube(stats for nerds connection speed) etc all pointed to 350 mbps+ speed. Also torrenting speeds were decent though slower than Airtel 200 mbps plan.Also no excessive blocking of torrenting sites like major players.

I discontinued it because airtel is like 100% reliable in my area (one brief post midnight outage in 2 years!) and I realized I didn't need a backup connection.But I wish them well.

 

[Deleted member 87056]

@Anurag Bhatia Believe it or not, the topic of discussion in this thread is heavily influenced by excitel and other ISPs which offer high speed plans for cheap. People want ISPs like Airtel, Tata Play, ACT and Jio to follow the excitel model ig, give 500 Mbps plans for 999.
The discussion kept circling back to "we don't need so much bandwidth", "improve routing and latency instead of focusing on higher bandwidth" and I think excitel is the ideal model here as per the demands mentioned in this thread by a lot of folks.

I would like to add one more point here, imo ISPs like Airtel, Tata Play and Jio should invest more money in training their ground staff and maybe pay them more money so that they take their job seriously resulting in better uptime and quicker fault resolution. In the era of AI, they should come up with a better chat support so that customers get what they want instead of talking to the dumb folks and so called "dedicated relationship manager". Assuming the the prices of the current plans will remain consistent in the upcoming years, I would prefer a better customer care experience and reliability over high speed plans. This is just my personal opinion.