Surfing in Slow Lane

In India, www (worldwide web) could spell worldwide wait. The latest reportcard on internet connectivity in the last quarter of 2008 has just been released by internet content distribution giant, Akamai. And India has emerged low on the speed charts.

Our average internet connection speed stood at just 772 Kbps, almost half of the global average of 1.5 Mbps at the end of 2008. In comparison, a fifth of the world enjoys internet speed higher than 5 Mbps. Not even 1% of our online population enjoys such fast connections.

This study ranks India at number 62 globally for high broadband adoption (speeds over 5 Mbps); number 81 for high broadband penetration and 93rd for broadband adoption (over 2 Mbps).

While internet connections are growing faster globally and several countries have seen a significant jump in average internet speed, connectivity speeds remained relatively flat in India. About a quarter of the users in India surf in the narrowband at speeds below 256 Kbps since the beginning of the year 2008. At the end of 2008, about 19% of global internet connections were at speeds greater than 5 Mbps, a 21% increase on the last quarter of 2007. Six countries connected to Akamai?s network witnessed average speed in excess of 5 Mbps.

Average connection speed is generally considered to be a good indicator of broadband adoption in the country. Indians downloading movies, videos, TV shows or other bandwidth-hungry applications obviously can?t expect the superfast speed enjoyed by South Koreans or Japanese. South Korea, that led the broadband pack, enjoyed 20 times faster average internet connection speed of 15 Mbps.

While 69% South Koreans surf at speeds higher than 5 Mbps, 54% Japanese (second fastest internet nation) enjoyed 5 Mbps plus speeds. In India, only 0.6% of internet connections enjoyed speeds over 5 Mbps and 3.74% of connections witnessed speeds over 2 Mbps.

Akamai, which supplies content delivery connections to worldwide carriers, service providers and online media companies, is not alone in calling India a laggard. India has slipped down four positions to rank 54th among 134 countries in the latest edition of a global report that evaluated the capabilities of countries to leverage information and communication technology (ICT) for their overall benefit and economic progress in 2007-08. Most other studies also paint a dismal broadband picture.

In sharp contrast, our political leaders promise to connect remote villages on the broadband highway in their election manifestoes. Clearly, India is nowhere close to superspeed services that the world is now moving to. While some Indian telcos have started offering broadband at 16 Mbps, majority of surfers are clearly at much lower speeds. About a quarter of the Indian internet connections are still in the narrowband at a speed below 256 Kbps, according to Akamai.

India might be low on internet speed chart but features prominently in the hall of shame. We ranked 17th globally in terms of attack traffic, with 1.16% of observed attack traffic in the fourth quarter of 2008. India was 12th in the previous quarter and was ranked among the global top 10 in the first quarter among countries with traffic attack origin, contributing 2.53% to global attack traffic.

The proverbial silver lining to the slow connection comes from the fast growth in the broadband population. Akamai study agrees and pegs number of unique IP addresses?number that identifies each machine on the internet?to 2.63 million. This translates to a growth of 42.91% year-on-year and puts India at number 20 globally, Akamai marketing manager, Karthikeyan Sathuragiri said.

We were undoubtedly among the fastest growing as the number of unique IP addresses grew only 20% globally. In India, number of unique IPs is lesser than the number of internet users because many users tend to share their computers at workplaces and cybercafes, which is a sizeable chunk of country?s internet population, Sathuragiri added.

Despite 43% growth in unique IP addresses, India lags behind the world in internet penetration and speed. The galloping growth in IP addresses is marred by the country?s low ranking of 148 globally for the number of unique IP addresses per capita, with 0.0023.

There was some comfort for India as the mobile phone industry grows at a breakneck pace. Leading research firms like Ovum expect mobile phones to provide a gateway to the future. Ovum projects explosion in mobile broadband users by 2014 as total mobile broadband users are expected to grow by over 1,000% over the next five years.

Even now, about a quarter or close to 100 million of India?s 380 million mobile phone users are estimated to have internet-capable phones. Obviously, all of them do not use their phones to access the Web, but more and more are surfing on the go.

In fact, India ranks among the fastest countries with growing mobile Web traffic in the world and accounted for 11.1% of the worldwide mobile Web browsing traffic in February, according to mobile Web analytics firm, Bango.

In January too, India featured in the top three club. With India being ranked fairly low on most broadband parameters, this surely offers a ray of hope.