Throttlers. Net bottlers.

“To be of good quality, you

have to excuse yourself from

the presence of shallow and

callow-minded individuals.”

— Michael Bassey Johnson

Three things hit me right between the eyes last week. One, Japanese technologists sporting white lab coats in dust-free test conditions managed to achieve data speeds of 1 million Gbps, crowning a year of efforts and tech-tweaking. Two, my own service provider in India’s Capital city of Delhi surreptitiously downgraded my data connectivity speeds from the contracted 1 Gbps to 25 Mbps for a week before I unearthed his craftiness and hollered blue murder at him. Three (stems from ‘Two’), the latest Tom Cruise movie I was watching kept buffering, with a white circle going round-round on my TV screen, driving me nuts and making me hate the gracefully-ageing Cruise and his femme fatales.

Movies, murder and dangling nuts aside, it was a most degenerative experience and led to a dispiriting realization… That while some nations like Japan are sending data at over a million gigabits per second in research labs, India – the globe’s fourth-largest economy – languishes with a sluggish broadband, intermittent mobile data and poor reliability. I am not writing a story on the lack of Indian ambition or our technological constraints. I am talking of deliberate speed-throttling, corporate one-upmanship and a failure to treat Net access as a public utility even in the digital-first century.

India’s average fixed broadband speed is 65 Mbps, while the global standard is 113 Mbps, according to Ookla’s latest ‘Speedtest Global Index’. Households in Singapore, Iceland, Chile and the UAE consistently clock speeds of above 250 Mbps. India’s is indeed a paradoxical situation – a nation of successful moon missions and 5G launches continues to face slow or dropped connections, buffering videos and slow downloads.

Throttling, Strategic Tiering

The issue isn’t one of absence of technology, but that of deliberate stifling of available capabilities. “In India, telcos have invested heavily and focus on tiered monetisation models. Internet service providers purposely ration speeds across consumer plans, making faster connectivity a premium product, even when the infrastructure supports higher throughput,” says Arvind Malhotra, Chair of Digital Strategy at UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School. “Unlike other nations where a public backbone subsidises base-level speeds, Indian ISPs treat bandwidth as a monetizable scarcity.”

Let’s understand what this means on the ground. Even customers subscribing to vaunted ‘unlimited’ broadband plans experience dramatic drops in speed after crossing a limit, per the ‘Fair Usage Policy’. Mostly it is without clear warning, an underhand tactic to nudge (read ‘frustrate’) them into upgrading. “Such practices are not unique to India but are nonetheless exploitative due to regulatory laxity,” says analyst Vinay Rathi. “For years, regulatory bodies haven’t updated Quality of Service parameters to match up with modern realities. Forget competitive or business spirit correcting things… that exists only in advertising, and almost never in actual user experience.”

Factor in India’s colonial infrastructure (in metropolises), congested corridors and cable-laying options, and the rampant competitive malpractice of cable cuts. This is an on-going and unrelenting instance of slow speeds and dropped connections cutting into everyone’s Web-surfing honeymoon. Add in a stutter basic Internet infrastructure set-up, which is reliant on a few global submarine cable landing points in Mumbai and Chennai. This is a lopsided dependency that has often been exposed, historically – as it does when Red Sea cable cuts repeatedly slow down traffic and online services for days on end.

Soliloquy 1: The dependence on foreign vessels for undersea cable repair compounds the problem. “India has no indigenous deep-sea repair capability,” network expert Rukmini Krishnamurthy says. “When cable cuts happen, the nearest ship has to be rerouted from Singapore or France, which costs time and bandwidth. The problem is not one of fragility, it is about redundancy.” India depends on 20 active subsea cables for 140 crore people. Compare that with Singapore, which has a population of just 56-lakh and still uses 30 service providers, all of them having better protection protocols.”

Indian Users, Global Comparison

Shreya Patil, who conducts online classes for tribal students in Maharashtra, often sees her classes drop mid-way due to signal constraints. “It’s frustrating, especially as I pay Rs 899 monthly for a ‘High-Speed 5G Plan’. If I file a complaint, I am told the cable or tower is ‘under maintenance’ or that there’s ‘congestion’. I have been fighting this for a year.” Even people sitting in Bengaluru’s IT corridor aren’t always better off. Rohit Kumar, founder of an SaaS startup, says, “My clients in Vietnam and Kenya get better upload speeds than me. We tried switching to a better ISP, but realised that all vendors in our area use the same underlying fibre grid. The illusion of choice is just that – an apparition.”

Relating such instances in the same breath as Japan’s 1-million-Gbps test speeds, therefore, is a waste of precious air and newsprint. Even South Korea and Estonia have long institutionalised Internet access as a basic human right. Estonia, a country with just 13 lakh people, implemented a National Broadband Strategy in 2005, delivering 100-per cent rural penetration by 2015. How? It didn’t wait for market forces; the state built the backbone, leased access to private firms and enforced quality standards. Today, Estonians vote, file taxes and access health records online with no Net friction.

In turn, the South Korean government directly partners with telcos to ensure that every citizen – urban or rural ­- has access to 1-Gbps speeds at affordable prices. “We see Internet as we see electricity. That changes everything,” says Yoon Seok-jung, CTO of KT Corp, Korea’s top telco. In the United States, SpaceX’s Starlink offers speeds of 150-250 Mbps in rural Montana and Alaska. In Kenya and Nigeria, satellite ISPs are gaining traction, bypassing corrupt telecom monopolies.

Soliloquy 2: India doesn’t lack talent or tech capability. But it does lack policy intent and market ethics. High-speed internet is more than a consumer good, it is a national enabler. In agriculture, real-time weather data, soil monitoring and crop advisories can transform yields, but only if connectivity reaches rural farm clusters. In education, as seen during COVID, crores of children fell behind due to lack of reliable Internet services. In healthcare, telemedicine remains a pipedream in Tier 2 / Tier 3 towns and tribal districts because video consultations just cannot happen without bandwidth stability.

Should We Even Run the 6G Race?

Today, India is planning to run the 6G race, using terahertz frequencies to run quantum networks. But do we need to do that at all, in a nation where a toddler in Jharkhand or Rajasthan struggles to watch educational videos in 144-p floppy (sic) mode, if at all? Consider this… An Ayushman Bharat worker in a Himachal village drives two hours to find mobile signals to upload low-res pictures. A tribal artisan in Odisha can’t sell his wares online because UPI apps freeze on weak bandwidth.

This is not a Digital Divide, this is Digital Denial. For now, 6G is but a mirage in a desert of strangulated speeds and buffering telecom promises. We need to take a hard look inward at the grassroots before looking skyward into a speculative future. Only when our villages have at least uninterrupted 20 Mbps – I am not speaking of lab peaks of 1 million Gbps – can we truly think of an ‘Internet Age’.

Soliloquy 3: A movie related to me a story of two wolves living in a cave; one was full of darkness and despair, while the other oozed light and hope. The TV asked me which wolf would survive. The answer – it would be the wolf that we feed. In data access and in everything else, we need to figure out who to trust for our today, tomorrow and future growth. We cannot build a nation or digital skyscrapers on a crumbling foundation. Not unless we want our own future to forever keep buffering.

The writer is a veteran journalist and communications specialist. He can be reached on narayanrajeev2006@gmail.com. Views expressed are personal