TRAI chief dissatisfied with broadband speed, growth

New Delhi: Mobile subscribers get low-speed Internet connectivity and broadband growth in the country is 'poor', TRAI Chairman Rahul Khullar said on Friday.

"In India, things are not very optimistic. Here, we have very low speeds on our mobiles and on all our devices. Our broadband connection growth is poor," he said at a seminar organised by Amity University.

The government has revised minimum broadband speed in country from download speed of 256 kilobit per second to 512 kbps from last July.

Theoretically, a high speed mobile broadband under 3G services can deliver top speed of 21 megabit per second which means that a movie can be downloaded in about 4 minutes. Telecom operators claim that they deliver speed of 2-4 mbps, which means that a movie can be downloaded in 40-20 minutes.

However, Khullar said: "The broadband is simply not as ubiquitous as it is elsewhere... Try and use your instrument to download videos on 3G and you will see."

Chairman of Telecom Regulatory Authority of India said there is need to make more spectrum, or radiowaves, available to operators so that they can deploy newer technologies for increasing broadband speed.

"You just got to have more spectrum in various bands. If you do not do that, there is no question of data growth. You have to build core infrastructure, increase penetration of devices through cheap mobiles or cheap tablets," he said.

Khullar also expressed concern over decline of landline connections saying that they can be instrumental in providing high speed broadband services.

Bharti Enterprise's Deputy Group CEO and MD Akhil Gupta said that in the last 3-4 years telecom industry has seen some massive problems mainly due to regulatory decisions, leading to a large number of new entrants who spurred "irrational competition" in the industry.

"Telecom industry in India is looking, once again, extremely promising. The promise comes from 2-3 reasons. After a long time, this industry has seen some improvement in the realised rates of voice," Gupta said.

Khullar asked industry to invest to alongwith government in building telecom infrastructure.

"The chief reason for this stagnancy is the lack of new investments in fixedline by incumbents owing to unviable business case for captive networks," Sterlite Networks Chief Operating Officer Vijay Jain said.