Broadband connectivity is lagging behind rising internet user base
With 137 million internet users, India, on paper, is second only to China’s 564 million in terms of the user base. In reality, we are miserably placed when it comes to meaningful internet access. For instance, the average broadband speed in India is a measly 1.2 Mbps, the lowest among 14 countries in the Asia-Pacific region and just over 40 percent of the global average.
Only 2.8 percent of our internet population connect at speeds of 4 Mbps or above; 89 percent connect at speeds less than 256 Kbps! India also accounts for just 2 percent of the entire set of nearly 700 million unique IP addresses that Akamai (an internet content delivery network) tracks around the world, compared to China’s 14 percent.
Successive governments, regulators and industry associations have been planning to improve our woeful internet broadband infrastructure, but nothing much has ever come of it. Because fixing broadband connectivity means solving multiple chicken-or-egg problems across the entire delivery chain.
Fixing Each Link in the Internet Chain
(This story appears in the 12 July, 2013 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)