Talk about being in slow lane. While Indian government, telecom operators and TRAI that regulates web access, continue to be totally oblivious to the poor state of internet in the country, the US government has reclassified broadband as an internet connection with minimum speed of 25Mbps.

In India, TRAI defines broadband connection as an internet connection that has minimum 512Kbps. This means in the US internet is officially almost 50 times faster than what we get in India. Interestingly, in the US the available internet speed is often considered average or poor. In several European and Asian countries the average internet speed is even faster. At the same time the cost of connection and bandwidth is also cheaper.

"Reflecting advances in technology, market offerings by broadband providers and consumer demand, the FCC updated its broadband benchmark speeds to 25 megabits per second (Mbps) for downloads and 3 Mbps for uploads. The 4Mbps/1Mbps standard set in 2010 is dated and inadequate for evaluating whether advanced broadband is being deployed to all Americans in a timely way," said the FCC, which regulates telecom sector in the US.

Meanwhile, Federal Trade Commission (FTC), another US government body, is going after telecom operators that promise unlimited internet connections but after consumption of certain amount of bandwidth, reduce the speed of the connection.

Yesterday, FTC said, "The issue here is simple: When you promise consumers 'unlimited,' that means unlimited."

However, it also clarified that it was going after the telecom operators over the misleading use of word "unlimited". It was an advertising related matter and not something about the practice of throttling data.

Of course, such practices are common in India and yet neither TRAI nor Department of Telecommunications have done anything about it. Currently in India it is almost impossible to find a truly unlimited internet plan. All telecom operators and broadband service providers offer bandwidth limited plans where the already very low connection speed drops to 512Kbps or 256Kbps once certain amount of bandwidth has been consumed.

Telecom operators call these plans "fair use policy" and justify it by saying that heavy internet users have to be stopped from consuming bandwidth.

