Broadband Speeds in India are an illusion

I have a saying which goes " broadband speeds follow the greener grass principle", you always feel that the neighbors bandwidth or even bandwidth is better than your speeds.

The fact is Golden Tiger Telecom Pvt. Ltd. (GTTPL) to date has offered far higher speeds at a fraction of the International prices. 

Wikipedia has shown the latest broadband speeds across the worlds as per  Akamai Q3 2015 rankings:

As the four top countries

and India at the 20th place with

The problem to a large degree lies in the definition of broadband speed as per TRAI in India. The definition is stated as the speed between the customer premises upto the closest node of the ISP. With fibre in play, technically packages of upto 100Mbps or even 1Gbps. 

This ISP offers a 100Mbps at Rs. 1334/- or US$ 18/- per month. This is impossible even with a country like US where the only comparable package is US$30. We must keep in mind that US broadband penetration gives it a large economy of scale.

There is no free lunch therefore as stated earlier the only way this can be managed is if the measurement is done between the customer premises and the node of the ISP which has fibre / CAT6 backbones (yes we still use CAT6 backbones in India).

Another simple back of the envelope calculation which shows the failure of this claim is assuming even 200 average online users in any sub-segment of a network (average online users are 200-500 in any ISP sub segment, so we are adding maximum margin or error) are doing various activites like streaming or downloading movies etc at even 50Mbps (50% of promised bandwidth), the network needs 10 Gbps backbone switches and connectivity to the rest of the world  which in Indian terms is just inconceivable at this time

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50% of 500 users = 250 users

250 users X 50Mbps = 12,500Mbps or 12.5Gbps

This in real terms would collapse the switches. 

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However at GTTPL we have our average speed as 16Mbps with a peak of 32Mbps taking into account our largest users. These are real speeds to our peer points at the extreme edges of our network facing the world and not drummed up speeds in order to fluff up sales.

With the advent of the need for more and more bandwidth for end connectivity to streaming sites like Netflix, Ganaa, Savvan with video conferencing sites like Skype, Google Hangouts and Indian and International Ecommerce Sites we have decided break the shackles set by TRAI and to go to 64Mbps REAL SPEED which is what is required to allow real time trouble free activity 

Bandwidth should be bandwidth and not an illusion