What is your download speed ?

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Do you actually get the kind of speed that your USB dongle adverts say?

It wasn’t long ago that I purchased a USB dongle that was advertising 2 Mbps speeds only to find that it was a struggle to get a tenth of that in major metropolitan centres. The situation has improved a little bit since then, but not much.

On the whole, the world’s internet speeds grew by 25% this year to an average of 2.6 Mbps. India, despite its rapidly growing economy and information technology workforce, has an average speed of about 1 Mbps. Only 1.45% of the internet connections in India meet the new standard criterion of 4Mbps speed that is required to be classified a true broadband connection.
Leading the list of countries with insanely fast internet connections are South Korea and Japan with blistering average net speeds of 14.8 Mbps and 10.8 Mbps respectively. The UK and the USA posted average internet speeds of 5.8 Mbps and 6.6 Mbps respectively according to Akamai’s state report.
The troubling thing about the Akamai statistics is that year-over-year growth in internet usage in India at 20% is slower than the world’s average growth of 25%.
On the other hand, broadband penetration in India is up by 85% over the last year leading to hopes that internet growth story isn’t as bleak as it seems.
Internet Service Providers (ISPs) have, on the whole, contented themselves with mediocre service delivery with frequent outages, but a fresh crop of service providers is challenging the status quo and winning rave reviews online. These pioneers have already forced other major vendors adopt bill-limit guarantee plans.
Beam Fiber, based out of Hyderabad, is a company willing to take internet to the next level offering speeds of 15 Mbps for a meagre Rs 1110. Even after the fair use policy limit of 40 GB is exhausted, the speed falls down to 4 Mbps.
While the company is restricted to Hyderabad now, if they keep on doing what they are, it won’t be long until the sluggish bigger players are forced to move to save their market shares.