I must confess, the quality of consumer broadband here in India is not at all comparable to global standards. With a massive IT, BPO and backoffice technology infrastructure; a household consumer would expect to have a decent internet connectivity. But the average speed-to-cost ratio is unacceptable.
Speedtest.net is a really cool broadband speed testing service. Their global broadband stats reveal that Japan leads the speed space (average last-mile speed of 9333kbps/3232kbps), with Sweden, Latvia, Romania and USA following. The average speed in India falls way short to 412kbps, while that of the Asian continent is up to 2134 kbps.
Back here in India, gone are the days of ISP monopoly, and there are several players in the market now. I’m using MTNL (of the largest telecom/ISP), and they recently announced 2mbps upgrades for all their customers. Until now, I used to crib about the frequent erratic connection and high costs. After this 2mbps upgrade (on restricted monthly bandwidth plans only) by MTNL, I took the Speedtest again, and the results are impressive …
While wireless internet is still relatively new in India, I discovered that there are some FON nodes around!
I’m archiving my test results and I’ll compare them once I return back to Australia.