Despite lagging in service excellent compared to private sector peers, state-owned BSNL/MTNL have recommended to the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) that minimum download speed for broadband solutions — wireline as nicely as wireless — be fixed at 2 mbps against the existing 512 kbps.
Private sector operators like Bharti Airtel, Reliance Jio, and Vodafone Idea, even though delivering speeds a lot greater than 2 mbps at the moment, have recommended that the present minimum speed of 512 kbps be retained till the challenges relating to affordability and availability in remotest components of the nation are overcome.
Fixing minimum speeds signifies that no operator can offer you tariff packages beneath that threshold. Though all private operators present download speeds far in excess of 2 mbps, in some remote components in the wireless solutions due to lesser quantity of BTS the speed limits may perhaps be reduce at the consumers’ finish.
The responses of the operators are portion of a consultation paper floated by the Trai on how to strengthen broadband solutions and connectivity in the nation.
Analysts mentioned BSNL and MTNL may perhaps have sounded ambitious in their responses for fixing minimum speeds at 2 mbps, but if that occurs, they may perhaps be the worst sufferers.
For instance, in the wireline segment, BSNL has 7.85 million broadband prospects, followed by Bharti Airtel which has 2.53 million customers. But as majority of BSNL’s wired broadband connections run on ADSL (asymmetric digital subscriber line) employing copper lines, making sure a greater speed for all customers could be hard, specially in smaller sized cities and towns. BSNL has fibre to household (FTTH) connections but it is restricted to only couple of larger cities.
Reliance Jio and Bharti Airtel are mainly delivering FTTH connections and also placing in enormous investments in it, therefore making sure greater speeds is not a difficulty.
In the wireless segment, BSNL does not at the moment offer you 4G solutions but has 3G solutions which is also categorised as wireless broadband. During the a variety of speed checks by international analytical firms like Ookla, Opensignal as nicely as Trai, the speed on BSNL network generally lags behind that of private operators. There are a lot of circles like Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, and so forth, exactly where the typical speed of BSNL in the final six months was much less than 2 mbps.
Private operators in their comments to Trai have highlighted that affordability and availability of broadband need to be the topmost priority of government and till the time infrastructure becomes omnipresent, the existing definition need to be continued. For instance, Bharti Airtel has mentioned that soon after two years, the definition can be changed. It has mentioned that for mobile broadband, any connection that is 4G or beyond need to be treated as broadband even though for fixed broadband, the minimum speed need to be fixed at 8 mbps.