Indian ISPs analyzed

Some excerpts from a long and not very user-friendly (regarding navigation) article from Network World. The article doesn’t rate the ISPs in India as the title suggests but has analyzed their strong and weak points:

Overall

• Users prefer DSL to cable internet.
• 67 percent of the users on cable Internet said that they were planning to change their ISP (mainly to DSL)
• The number of small ISPs operating in particular areas of a city or region is diminishing rapidly.

Cable Internet

• Hathway and Sify are the dominant cable Internet providers (as of 2008)
• Usage calculations are tricky, even when the user is out of town and not using the connection, the logs show usage (cable internet)

DSL

• Airtel dominated the charts with 90 percent users rating it excellent when it came to wiring, installation and activation procedure.
• Almost 45 percent of the home users in India are on a BSNL DSL connection.
• Where other ISPs have struggled to provide access in rural areas, BSNL has stood up to the task of bringing affordable broadband to the C and D class cities.
• Almost 35 percent of BSNL subscribers rated the quality of installation between Average and Poor.
• Tataindicom ranked 3rd in terms of market share as per the survey results.
• When it comes to cable internet, the service levels as well as connectivity is plagued with the same old issues of frequent down time, erratic speeds and high latency connections.
• 45.6 percent of the respondents were on unlimited plans, and 21.7 percent opted for the unlimited at night plan
• Almost 35 percent of the DSL users complained against the capped connections with very low data download limits.
• 40 percent of the users are on 256Kbps connection and almost 83 percent are in the unlimited plan. These connections are popular because they are affordable and sufficiently fast for basic needs.
• 49.6 percent of the respondents say they utilize their home connectivity for work
• 30.2 percent of the respondents are into online gaming
• The download speeds for broadband connections are as high as 2Mbps, the upload speeds are generally 50 percent or even 25 percent of the download speed.

Business Users

• Business Users: Reliance users were satisfied with the speeds they were getting, the reliability and were particularly appreciative of the quality of installation. Users found business plans to be very expensive

Wireless Internet

• Wireless Internet is not that impressive, 3G eagerly awaited
• 22.1 percent of respondents had used wireless Internet and while most of them found the service affordable, speeds and reliability were serious concerns.
• The average real-world speeds provided by wireless players in India range between 2-7 KBps. Just enough to check mail, chat and surf moderately