TRAI To Decide On Minimum Download Speed For Internet On Mobile

While the world is already talking about 5G Network Rollout In South Korea In 2017 - Download 800 Mb In A Second, one of the largest mobile markets in the world - India is still struggling to get bare-minimum download speeds on mobile. That's totally unacceptable since Internet has become one of the basic necessities of life for the mobile generation. The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India, aka TRAI has acknowledged the problem and has decided to setup a threshold for the minimum download speeds on mobile Internet. This means, TRAI will make it mandatory for all the telecom service providers in India to deliver minimum download speeds for all the wireless data connections.

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As of today, there's no official binding regulation on the telecom service providers to deliver Internet at any minimum speed; and that's why your download speeds can go down to just a few KBps while you're expecting 7.1 Mbps or 21 Mbps as promised by the companies in their advertisements.

We do not have any information about what speed is TRAI going to decide as threshold, but it's likely to be the broadband speed aka 512 Kbps. While this is still very low; the 3G and CDMA-EVDO service should be able to provide about 1Mbps speed with 95% success rate. On the 2G connections, however - the minimum speed is expected to be about 5.6 Kbps.

TRAI is seeking public opinion till May 5 and will accept counter comments by May 12. Check out the official PR from TRAI in the source link below.

Source: #-Link-Snipped-# (PDF)

Replies

  • Sarathkumar Chandrasekaran
    Sarathkumar Chandrasekaran
    Happy news for internet users in mobile phones.Telecom regulator of India has come up with a good news that there would be minimum broadband speed for download to be provided be the telecom operators to their mobile and wireless subscribers. This action of setting minimum download spped has arised due to enormous complaints from users that they were not given the prescribed download speed and its far below as the telecom giants prescribed. According to TRAI the minimum speed of download for the 2G GSM users would be 56kbps and 1mbps(95% success rate) for 3G GSM users. As far the CDMA users were concerned the TRAI has set the speed of 512mbps with 95% success rate for CDMA-HSD users and 1mbps with 95% success rate for CDMA-EVDO users.This is a wake up call for us because many of us would haven't thought about the minimum download speed and the telecom giants were making a huge profit by faking up with their attractive data plan ADS.After the complaints, TRAI analysed all the telecom data download spped and said that they had monitored the data speed of telecom service providers for each data plan since last three quarters and their speed is not uniform across all LSA(licensed service areas) For 2G they got a speed varying from 21.42kbps to 97.06kbps between operators. THe telecom operators has been issueing ads with volume only and not with speed details with no commitment towards speed.
    My experience: I had used Vodafone,Aircel, Airtel Tata Docomo and with my experience Airtel and Vodafone are good with their speeds but not as prescribed by TRAI. I had a average speed of 30-40kbps in 2G network in vodafone and In 3G network, I got an average speed of 150-300kbps. Highest speed was noted by me was 70kbps in 2G network and 700kbps in 3G network.
    Comment with the speed you had experienced and your view on decision by TRAI.
  • Ankita Katdare
    Ankita Katdare
    Let us hope the minimum speed limit won't be lesser than 1 MB/s. That would be great.
  • Kaustubh Katdare
    Kaustubh Katdare
    Those who want to offer suggestions will have to send an email to the concerned authority. The email ID has been published in the PR document (see the source). I believe among all the operators, IDEA cellular has the best network coverage. I typically get speeds between 1 Mbps - 1.5 Mbps; and I'm all okay with that.

    Do we have any Airtel 4G users here?
  • Satya Swaroop Dash
    Satya Swaroop Dash
    TRAI's idea of setting a lower speed limit for mobile networks will face a tough resistance from telecom operators. I have a basic understanding of how a cellular tower works. Every tower is given a certain bandwidth of internet and that bandwidth is shared among the users in the area. If they expect that every cell phone in a densely populated area has to get the minimum speed, then cellular operators have two options either install more transmitters or increase the bandwidth per base station. Both these options shall be quite expensive for them and the these in turn will increase mobile subscription rates.
  • Rajni Jain
    Rajni Jain
    Very nice step taken by TRAI, as many of us get frustrated due to few kbps downloading speed.

    However,as per bloomberg's survey average speed of downloading in India is 0.09 mbps.

    mobile download

    We need to be realistic before we will wish for a mbps speed(currently lower side we are getting 5 to 10 kbps as minimum. I wish will get at least 100 kbps as minimum)

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