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This wonderful cartoon and the tag line almost tell you the whole story about what a joke high-speed Broadband Internet in India is.

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With erratic speeds and poor quality of service, high-speed Internet is still like slow torture

The cartoon is from a highly informative article “The Illusion Of Movement” by Arindam Mukherjee in this week’s issue of Outlook magazine. Here is a short excerpt…

Sandhya Jain, a Delhi-based author, says she’s had enough of high-speed Internet. The promised 128 kilobits per second (kbps) is never more than 56-65 kbps. Apart from the crawling speed, there are mysterious drop-offs several times a day, just when she’s getting down to work. And don’t even mention service—three months ago, Jain shifted from a top cable broadband service to the largest private broadband service provider. But there’s been no respite. She now plans to wait a few weeks before taking a call on changing her service provider yet again.

Sounds familiar? At offices and homes across the country, a farce is being played out in the name of broadband services. Most consumers are denied the promised speeds despite paying for it and service providers are routinely turning a blind eye once the customer is in the bag. And what is available is hardly robust and reliable. Worse, there is no proper redressal system to take care of consumer complaints. The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI), the body that oversees broadband services, does not entertain individual subscriber complaints, it only looks into grievances from ‘organised groups’. Hence, consumers are at the mercy of service providers.

[Read the entire article. No subscription is required]

For those who want the short answer, here it is in the concluding paragraph of the article…

Clearly, it’s not a pretty picture for the consumer: big targets but a lack of vision on the part of the government, finger-pointing by private operators, and a regulator that doesn’t have the mandate to address consumer grievances. [...] One urgent requirement is that an ombudsman, or TRAI, look into consumer complaints. [...] “It’s a big issue as a major part of communication and India’s future is dependant on broadband growth,”  [...] What’s worrying is that India’s response to the problem is not keeping pace with promised broadband speeds.

So it is the all too familiar Indian tale of red tape in the public sector, avarice and lies in the private sector and apathy from the regulator. The only missing ingredient (or it is in there and no one has found it yet), is corruption.

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