I found myself stuck in one of the all-too-common, huge traffic snarls on my way for a client meeting in Mumbai, India and wondered if professionals in that city and in India, overall, could telecommute and do their bit to prevent traffic congestion and make a dent in the air pollution. In conversations with friends and colleagues I was surprised to learn that telecommuting was not practical in Mumbai and Bangalore, one reason being that reliable high speed broadband connections are still  not available at a reasonable price. As someone explained to me, the practical definition of broadband in major cities in India today is a “sometimes on” connection with speeds ranging from 64-256 Kbps. Though national policies have been defined to provide for an ”always-on” connection with minimum speed of 256 Kbps, adherence to that policy is a different, seemingly unrelated issue.

It is evident that consumers would tolerate any speed when given a choice between no broadband and some broadband! Broadband adoption stands in contrast to the huge strides made in introducing mobile phones to a large middle class population. Setting aside the fact that broadband penetration as of June 2008 had only reached 4.38 million subscriptions (less than 1 percent of the population) according to the Telecommunications Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI), I wanted to highlight the challenges faced by this small percentage of the population that has broadband:

·     Frequent Downtimes: Most ISPs have higher downtimes compared to mature economies, which occur due to a variety of reasons such as power outages, cable faults etc. The downtimes vary from a few hours to a couple of days in a month.

·     Cap on usage: This is almost an unwritten rule followed by Indian ISPs where heavy users are capped either by data limits (as low as 400 MB to 1-2GB per month). Traffic-shaping is applied to links experiencing congestion during high-usage times of day. when a certain limit is crossed. Some ISPs like BSNL and Bharti offer unlimited downloads for an extra fee and have also introduced high speed BB packages.

Sadly, in India broadband adoption has not lived up to the promise from a few years ago. The absence of a wider base of users and the lack of active promotion of content creation in areas such as education, agriculture, health care, and e- governance in regional languages make it all the more difficult for benefits of connectivity to be shared amongst everyone. It is unlikely this situation will change dramatically if the “rationing” mindset that limits data downloads is not replaced by a more progressive outlook that can take advantage of a middle class willing to pay for reliable high speed broadband access. Yankee Group believes that while the widespread adoption of broadband is critical in supporting social and economic prosperity in India, it is also as important to deliver high speed broadband reliably to customers that have it today.