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Comment by ankeshk | Hacker News Reader

This actually makes me sad.

Most consumers don't even get to choose anything over 1mbps in India. 512kbps speeds is the norm (which is also like $22 per month in Mumbai - where I'm based. $22 for 512kbps!)

On top of that, bandwidth capping and other such practices is still the norm in India! A lot of ISPs don't allow you anything over 4gb or 6gb of bandwidth per month!

Oh what I would give to see a chart by an Indian ISP that starts with minimum speeds of 1.5mbps!

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In Afghanistan, Internet was only really available on a couple bases. Our's (U.S.) offered troops 56K to your plywood shack for $35/mo and it had about 50% uptime. After a year of that, pretty much all domestic Internet connections rock. I empathize with your plight, albeit over a shorter amount of time.

Yeah, it is a couple of years behind the state-of-the-art, but the main reason is beacuase of how TRAI defined broadband (Always on connection with minimum download speed of 256 kbps). If they increase the threshold, I think the ISPs will catch up.

From what I have observed, the ISPs (or the telcos) in India are a lot better (in the 'dont-be-evil' point of view) than their US counterparts. I have used Airtel and BSNL broadband services for many years and both of them worked perfectly well without any glitches at all. I cannot comment on BSNLs, but the Airtel customer service is very good too. I may be wrong here.

I am using a 256Kbps connection for some time now. It is more than enough for my humble needs. So cannot complain. Viewing videos and all is a pain though.

I live in fairly urban US, about two miles from a major pipeline with so much bandwidth that attempting to describe it would only show my lack of networking knowledge.

My university has spent thousands of man-hours throttling student bandwidth use (to 30GB/mo). Right now we're using less than half of the bandwidth we pay for.

:-(

I am using 1.5 mbps down/500kbps up, at the place I am staying for a couple of months in Bangalore. It is good enough for most of my work. I can't do multi-party video conferencing, but I don't _have_ to have that to do my work.

But, yes it is a step down from the 100 mbps line at home, but it isn't 60 times better at home, but it feels maybe 5-10 times better. The worst is probably the uneven service. It drops quite a lot (sometimes several times an hour) and you often have to wait for minutes for it to come back up again, not to talk about the powercuts. If this place didn't have a backup generator things would be dire.

Ouch! $22/month for 512 kbps? I pay about $15/month for 30 mbps and at this point couldn't imagine living without it. Downloading big updates, videos, game demos, you name it, and by the time you're done naming it you're almost done downloading it...

EDIT: To clarify, I get that in Redmond, WA. Definitely have a serious advantage there.

In which country?

How's this: $40/month for 1500kbps (With a 2GB! download allowance. and excess downloads charged at 15c per MB after that!)

http://www.bigpond.com/internet/plans/adsl/plans-and-offers/

* That's about $36USD

Bigpond ain't to bad now if your willing to pay a premium, 30mbps and 100gb download on cable for $140

Did you see the point below about $15/mo in Redmond for 30mbps/Unlimited. (When you are paying 10x as much for a service it can leave a bitter taste in your mouth)

That being said - I am getting tempted to suck-up my disdain for Telstra/BP and sign up for 30mbps cable.

You think that's bad? I'm in Jordan, and I'm paying 70USD/Month for 2mbps/512kbps down/up ADSL with a 10GB monthly cap. Each additional GB is another 7.5 USD.

(downloads after 10pm and before 7am are cap-free)

You were lucky. We lived for three months in a paper bag in a septic tank. We used to have to get up at six in the morning, clean the paper bag, eat a crust of stale bread, go to work down t' mill, fourteen hours a day, week-in week-out, for sixpence a week, and when we got home our Dad would thrash us to sleep wi' his belt.

And you try and tell the young people of today that ..... they won't believe you.

It's worth remembering that this is an issue even in the US, too! Until about a year ago my house in rural New York was stuck on dial-up. (We now thankfully have 10mbps DSL.)

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