Slow and Slowest - Indian Net Connection Speed.

Money is what you pay for quality. So you should rather be getting net free of cost as the speed at which you net connects in India is much below the other developing nations.
India though stands at Number 7 in the world for Internet subscribers it stands at 115 in the world for Internet connection speed.
India has been ranked 115th among 223 countries in terms of average internet connection speeds.

This State of the Internet report is in the latest quarterly study by Akamai Technologies, the US-based internet content distribution giant.

India, says the report, has an average internet connection speed of just 772 Kbps compared with the global average of 1.5 Mbps.

And, at the end of 2008, approximately 19 per cent internet connections around the world were at speeds greater than 5 Mbps -- a 21 per cent increase over the average global connection speed at the end of 2007. In line with their average connection speed of 15 Mbps, and their appearance at the top of the list for the prior three quarters, South Korea once again ranked as the country with the highest percentage of connections on high broadband (greater than 5 Mbps).

India ranks 93rd globally for broadband adoption (with 3.74 per cent connections at speeds over 2 Mbps) and is positioned at 55th globally for narrowband adoption (with 25.8 per cent of connections at speeds below 256 Kbps).

South Korea, Sweden, the Netherlands, Denmark and Norway had more high broadband IPs per capita than in the prior quarter studied. This is consistent with what would be expected from the initiatives to bring higher-speed connectivity, including fibre-to-the-home efforts, to consumers in these countries, notes the Akamai report.(via)

Future Prospects -
The average connection speed will be an interesting number to track in the coming quarters and gives us a clear indication of the growing broadband adoption in the country.

We continue to see strong trends that point to ever-improving internet penetration figures in India, with observed unique IPs growing 43 per cent year-on-year and average connection speed well above 750 Kbps.

The report also notes that the number of unique IPs or internet addresses from India grew 42.91 per cent year-on-year, to 2.63 million. Globally, the number of unique IPs grew 20 per cent. In terms of broadband penetration, India had 0.0001 broadband IPs per capita.

India ranked 17th globally on another parameter called attack traffic -- a measure of rogue activity on the Internet, such as DNS attacks, bots, spam activity and hackers.

The Internet Bus Project by Google India hits South India.

Google India has launched the internet bus project to promote Internet usage in India. Currently India ranks 7th in internet usage with 32.1 million users. This project can add some more users in India.

The Internet Bus Project is an attempt educate people about what the Internet is, and how it may be beneficial to their lives, by taking the Internet experience to them through a customised Internet-enabled bus, which will travel to several towns and cities across India.

Bus will be loaded with useful and informative content in English and Tamil.
The Bus starts on 3rd feb till 13th March.

Google Internet Buss Project website.

I call this as an CSR activity by Google India.
What do you think about it ?

India ranked 7th in internet usage.

The world Internet users have crossed 1 billion mark this December.
This is a comScore result.
In any case, only between 15 and 22 percent of the world’s population is on the Internet. We have a long way to go.

Top 15 countries, by Internet population:

1. China: 179.7 million
2. United States: 163.3 million
3. Japan: 60.0 million
4. Germany: 37.0 million
5. United Kingdom: 36.7 million
6. France: 34.0 million
7. India: 32.1 million
8. Russia: 29.0 million
9. Brazil: 27.7 million
10. South Korea: 27.3 million
11. Canada: 21.8 million
12. Italy: 20.8 million
13. Spain: 17.9 million
14. Mexico: 12.5 million
15. Netherlands: 11.8 million

So Imagine India in the first position then ?
Why always China Can and India can't.
One reason why India is seventh in the list is because of low educational qualification.
Another can be no computer literacy or also no availability of Internet in remote areas of India.
Image credits - roopinder.com