Sorry for being away for so long. In some ways the next year may well be a watershed moment for Indian broadband but with lot of downsides as well as upsides. This would be a bit of biggie so have your favorite drink and have your legs up.
The last month has been sort of mini-hellish as far as broadband for me is concerned. I haven’t been getting good speeds for broadband and when I get it is intermittent. I have been using a Reliance Jio dongle but that too has been an iffy affair.
To their credit though, both the ISP’s speeds are constant. We have come a long way from the 56 kbps on-off which was a ‘feature’ when Internet was introduced in India. At times I do get 1 Mb speeds on Reliance Jio but that is late night, never in the morning, afternoon when I’m working.
One of the interesting ‘feature’ which I observed when I started using the Reliance Jio dongle was that the jio page would load/render 10x-20x times than any other site. While Firefox inspector could probably give me and I could share the speed numbers it probably wouldn’t be possible to know if there was either some sort of hidden cache or a ‘fast lane’ to the site in question.
Due to speed issues though, my work-time inevitably gets lengthened leaving no time for blogging.
One interesting thing though, I had been trying to use youtube-dl to download streaming videos from youtube while the world cup was on and it was a total failure. About couple of years back, I had reported an issue with the HLS streams which still seems to be an issue with any big video on youtube even today, especially in case if the connection breaks and you try to continue and at the end youtube-dl patches all the different segments together.
The same/similar issues seems to lie with the DASH streaming as well. I tried using youtube-dl both with the World Cup games as well as Reliance Industries AGM meeting live presentation but with pathetic outputs and this is at friends places where they have fantastic web speeds 😦 . I later was able to download the video when the live-streaming embargo was lifted (about 4 hours later 😦 ) . The same was also true of world cup games when they were recorded for posterity. I did another small experiment, I used the browser to see the games and at those times the speeds were much better than not. Whether it were the browser cookies which were responsible or something else at work is not known.
I have to share I tried not just youtube but thanks to youtube-dl a variety of live-streaming websites but unfortunately the experience was more or less the same. I don’t remember if the CDN’s were the same but did see Akamai serving a lot of content, although don’t know how much Akamai CDN is used in India. I do know it’s been picking up in the last few years or so.
I am sharing the Reliance AGM presentation as a weblink as well as planet.debian.org usually discards youtube videos.
I would urge almost all of the people if possible to download and see the video if they can.
Many people like me would be pretty interested in the service if the pricing is right (which I guess would be enticing as it’s a winner takes all attitude.) and they have proceeds from their hydrocarbons revenue generation. While most of the infrastructure is already in place, which the younger brother has already got lot of dark fiber already sitting all around India for almost 5 years now, it just needs to be lit/powered up. As far as content generation part of the speech is concerned, this needs to be viewed in terms of what Netflix has been doing in the marketplace. The economist shared a series of articles on netflixonomics and the Special Report on Internet talked about in economist last month.
Reliance Industries through its arm Reliance Jio has deep pockets and can afford to be a loss-leader in broadband as well as partnering, developing web-series and be part of the deep surveillance state that is already there while at the same time give a compelling offer to millions of people who have been suffering bandwidth woes till date. None of the other broadband providers has either the amount of money or the kind of management bandwidth these guys have. They already are owners of a handful of channels so getting into web-series production shouldn’t be as hard as for somebody who would be getting it now. From an individual view-point the only way I can save myself from getting in this deep surveillance state is whenever they launch the services is to have a generic ONT just like generic xDSL modems. That way I could change providers without changing equipment and just change the frequencies similar to what was done in the xDSL world if it’s possible, would have to wait, watch and see if some company offers generic ONT equipment for end-user sale.
At the end, I dunno whether I should cry or be happy at the state of the affairs. Most of the telecom companies are losing revenue and quite a bit of consolidation has been happening in the Indian telecom sector last couple of years. The latest happening has been the integration of IDEA with Vodafone and as we know the less competition there is, lesser the benefits for the consumer 😦 . I have also been keeping an eye out on TRAI the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India and it seems the institution has been weakened and has been ceding its authority to corporate pressures. Part of it has been the total dis-interest shown by people at large also at the working, surveys and discussions that TRAI often asks the general public. The way things are, it’s not far-fetched that the same mechanisms become common-place in TRAI as they are in FCC, US.
As have probably shared before on the blog there have been at least two if not three different plans for having a national fiber back-haul as well as common carrier status which ISP’s could use to provide competitive services but hasn’t worked till date. It was formerly known as NOFN (National Optical Fiber Network) which has since been subsumed under a new Avatar called BBNL and there was another name which I don’t remember at the moment which it was known in 2k7-2k8. The only thing I have been seeing is the project costs increased while the outcome targets while optical fiber prices have crashed globally.
At the end, the story is just beginning for India’s tryst with fiber. We would know how the story goes only after few years fiber is with us and we know how things play out. For now, Reliance Jio seems to be the clear favorite.
Experiences in the community 