As reported earlier in January 2009, broadband subscriber base grew to 5.65 million, compared to 5.45 million a month earlier and recorded 74.12% growth during the last year.Not yet affected by recession broadband penetration is still growing though at a slower pace when compared to the stellar mobile subscriptions.
It is well known fact that Broadband subcriptions usually quoting data rates greater than or equal to 256Kbps are not quite near to it most of the time, this is because of the un-restricted contention ratios and Internet Service Providers offering service at a contention ratio of 80:1 to 100:1.If you don’t know the contention ratio is the ratio of the potential maximum demand to the actual bandwidth. The higher the contention ratio, the greater the number of users that may be trying to use the actual bandwidth at any one time and, therefore, the lower the effective bandwidth offered, especially at peak times.The higher contention ratio’s maintained by the operators thus always resulted in poor Quality of service.
Reportedly TRAI has now issued guidelines to ensure that ISP’s and telecom operators provide the minimum required broadband speed to their customer and has restricted the Contention ratio to 50:1 for residential connections and 30:1 for business.
This move of TRAI will now alleviate the quality of service for the broadband subscriptions,but might also result in increased tariffs,as now operators can not accomodate their subcribers in the available spectrum and will have to buy more spectrum.
Apparently even at the existing contention ratio consumers will not get more than 64 kbps speeds. Which means atleast half an hour to download a 5 minute song!
What’s your view on Airtel’s new Fair Usage Policy for broadband consumers? It’s bad enough that 256k speeds are passed off as broadband at 5X international prices and now this. It’s kicking up a fair bit of storm – http://afup.broadbandforum.in/
http://itwofs.com/beastoftraal/2009/03/02/421/