Siddhesh Poyarekar wrote:
I'm really not sure what you guys are talking about here. When all the limitations are mentioned in a plan you buy, how is it a fraud? The same goes for Airtels fair usage policy -- it's not a secret internal memo. It's a public document.
My point exactly.
Also, regarding the cost of broadband in India, isn't there another dimension to it, i.e. the amount of traffic that goes from one country to another, that determines this cost? I had read about this somewhere (also in one of the manifestos Venky had posted) that the amount of
There are charges sure. At the highest level the ISPs are charged as per the interconnect's speed. For example, Bharti wants to connect to, say, ISP1 in the US. ISP1 will charge Bharti on the basis of the speed at which they interconnect - 100Mbps, 1Gbps etc... This is irrespective of the amount of data that flows in or out of the pipe. Its just the width of the pipe.
Measuring the volume of traffic would be against Net Neutrality because you'd be charging on the basis of how much data is transferred.
traffic going out of India as opposed to the amount that comes in also determines this cost. So it's easy for European countries, Japan, China and the US to give download caps of 250-300 GB or so since most of their traffic is either local or outbound. Also, there are chances you might reach it since they have bandwidths up to 8 Mbps (I had read something about 3 Gbps lines in Japan). So it's really not fair to compare between the US/UK and India for this.
Buddy Indian telcos like TATA and Reliance have bought Tyco and Flag telecom. They've tons of unlit capacity all over the world. Theres no shortage of capacity. Infact Indian companies now control a major portion of the international bandwidth.
Also, having a download cap when you're never going to reach it is absurd -- why have it in the first place? The cap is generally analogous to the capacity of the network. While it may not necessarily fair, it is a business limitation that Airtel chooses to work in. If you as a customer do not like that cap then simply change ISPs. No point cribbing on the mailing list -- they don't read it :)
No its not absurd.
- Dinesh