I mean when I was in France I used to get 25Mbps Unlimited at mere Rs.1000 with satellite T.V,
You must have been in France a while ago... and the service was always triple-play - since about 2004 or 2005 it included a VOIP line with the 200+ channels and broadband in the 30eur price tag. Did you have a Freebox or a Neufbox?
Why is Internet so costly in India, govt companies, political leaders need to wake up and start focussing more on Internet broadband sector from now on, I am totally dependent on Internet for all my Entertainment and
business needs, hope MTNL officers are listening to what I am saying, hope they reduce prices and provide decent speeds at affordable prices ASAP.
In short, the last mile situation is a royal pain in the ass.
Unlike France (and indeed, most of Europe) where there's a single access network which all providers use, MTNL and BSNL are the only companies which have fairly ubiquitous networks which are not open to anyone else. This of course needs to change, but every time local-loop unbundling comes up in parliament and so on, MTNL and BSNL both veto it for reasons I can't figure out.
There's nothing stopping them from providing "line speed" as is offered in France (when I was there it went from 12 to 24 to 50 to 100mbit/s, migrating from
ADSL2 to ADSL2+ to Fiber Optics) and other countries like Australia and NZ, but both providers services vary in quality from neighbourhood to neighbourhood - in some areas it sucks while in others it's adequate - not only would you see significant variations in speed, there's still other issues to deal with.
Unfortunately, the quality of service and/or service interruptions can't always be helped thanks to things MTNL/BSNL can't always control (like the theft of copper - something that doesn't really happen in France).
However, this doesn't answer the question as to why MTNL's 2mbit/s pricing is 5x that of it's 1mbit/s pricing. What's more, is that that price went up not so long ago from Rs3999. are people on 2mbit/s plans using 5x as much data? I doubt it. After all, 2mbit/s doesn't cost any more than 1mbit/s to provide, save the actual data usage. My thinking is that they should just remove the speed caps altogether and charge only for data, because Rs5k for what is considered by most of Europe to be "basic Internet" is just too much.
However, there are other advantages France has that India does not.
Firstly, it's a huge carrier of traffic - the Paris-Lyon route is THE busiest Internet route in the world, sustaining about 2Tbit/s. That's more actual usage than India even has got of International capacity lit up.
Secondly, huge hosting Infrastructure.
Thirdly, being France, most French content is contained within the country - India's got some ridiculous percentage (I've heard as high as 85%) of it's traffic coming in from the USA, which makes it all the more expensive to provide.
Fourth, France has an excellent peering infrastructure. India's sucks the big one, since they still charge by the gigabyte. For peering. Which costs practically zero - it's a 1 meter cable from 1 switch to another switch. And they charge per gigabyte (plus the 3 lakh yearly fee!). In France, it's all flat-rate. I don't have the exact prices, but I know in Finland it's about 900 euros a month for a 10Gbit/s peering link.
Fifth, Proximity. India is fairly isolated geographically. You don't like many of your neighbours, and you don't connect directly to them overland (excepting one recently opened cable with China). France on the other hand, has many other large bandwidth consuming neighbours with which it has many many large cables going over borders which basically don't exist any more.
Last but not least, even the traffic that does head from Europe to the US does so on the huge glut of cables spanning the Atlantic, which are offered at ridiculously cheap prices by comparison: you can buy 10Gbit/s there for what we'd pay for not even close to 1Gbit/s.
While I agree that MTNL's 2mbit/s prices are nothing short of shocking and stupid, I hope that clarifies something about pricing in general.
