India's internet users suffer from one of the world's worst net usage experiences. Average internet speed in India is lower than all the other countries in BRIC, and lower than most other emerging economies.

Quick facts and figures Source

In comparison to India's paltry average connection speed of 2.8 Mbps, South Korea had the highest in Asia-Pacific and the world at 26.7 Mbps. India also had the lowest average peak connection speed at 21.2 Mbps, while Singapore retained the top spot at 135 Mbps.

Overall, India occupied the 115th position for average connection speed and the 114th position for average connection speed globally. The average page load time for a broadband connection in the country was 3.9 seconds.

India's slow Internet is a big problem. A few months ago, the country overtook the US in the world's second-largest Internet user base, with an estimated 402 million users. Over 76% Indians access the Internet on their mobiles, but are plagued by patchy and slow connections.

While the figure of 2.5 Mbps is the lowest in Asia, it is still far higher than the official figure set by The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India, which classifies 512 Kbps as broadband.

Service providers are simply maximising data connection sales without offering good network quality. It is time we stop being cheated by slow internet speeds and get what we pay for.

Following are excerpts taken from an article in The Economic Times on 23 June, 2016 by Kalyan Parbat.

Wired broadband speeds available to 17 million paying consumers in India is far below what service providers promise when they charge end users for particular data services - a data service package that promises 8 Mbps will typically max out at 5 Mbps. Wireless connections are even more patchy.

How does this happen?

In a wired broadband service used at homes, two factors determine performance. First, the contention ratio, a key metric that measures the number of internet users sharing a fixed amount of data capacity or 'bandwidth' in a location at the same time. If the number of such users is large, the contention ratio will be high, and real internet speed low.

Second, the latency of a network, a measure of the delay a user experiences when his/her computer tries to access an internet server. If a service provider runs a low latency network, internet speed will be better. Spectrum availability in India is also dismal, far below that of Western countries and major emerging economies.

Say, 10 customers are sold 2 Mbps connections, which means 20 Mbps should be available. But the company may provide only 5 Mbps for these 10 customers, assuming not all customers will be using their internet connection heavily at the same time. Therefore, the guaranteed internet speed is not 2 Mbps, but just 500 kbps.

What needs to happen?

Sunil Abraham, executive director of Bengaluru-based research organisation, Centre for Internet & Society, argues Trai must ensure mandatory disclosure of contention ratios by service providers.

If such disclosures become mandatory, home broadband users can buy wired internet connections more judiciously with a better sense of what data speeds to expect from telcos and the possible quality of their experience.

We deserve fairly distributed internet speeds for the service we pay in the world's fastest growing internet market.

I urge all of you to sign and share this petition and request R. S. Sharma, Chairman of Telecom Regulatory Authority of India to act upon this.