Telcos Want to Curb Internet Speed to 64 Kbps in Fair Usage Plans

Telcos Want to Curb Internet Speed to 64 Kbps in Fair Usage Plans is a Mint news report by Arunabh Saikia published on 14 March 2016. The piece covers the push by telecom operators, led by Bharti Airtel, to cap broadband speeds at 64 kbps once a fair usage plan (FUP) data limit is crossed, in direct opposition to the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI)’s recommendation that minimum broadband speeds should not fall below 512 kbps. Sunil Abraham calls the proposal “anti-consumer”, arguing that telcos are using the pretext of heavy users to throttle speeds for all consumers.

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Article Details

📰 Published in:: Mint
📅 Date:: 14 March 2016
👤 Author:: Arunabh Saikia
📄 Type:: News Report
📰 Newspaper Link:: Read Online

Full Text

While the debate around Net neutrality in India seems to have been settled for now, Internet activists and telecom companies could be at loggerheads very soon once again.

Except that this time, there hasn't been half as much noise from Internet users, or in the media, as there was in the case of Facebook's Free Basics plan.

On 10 February, two days after the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) struck down Free Basics, Bharti Airtel Ltd contended that telecom firms should be allowed to curb speed to 64 kilobits per second (kbps) in fair usage plans (FUPs).

This was in response to a TRAI consultation paper that recommended, among other things, that download speed in a broadband connection should not be below 512kbps. FUPs are data plans in which users get unlimited amounts of data use. The catch, though, is that the speed decelerates after a certain point. The idea is to ensure that a few people with large bandwidths don't impair the Internet experience for other people.

Airtel argued that "customers misuse the minimum broadband speed provision and tend to overuse the data limit in their quota", which it claimed led to higher costs for other customers. It said TRAI should not set a minimum speed threshold, and if it must, it should be fixed at 64kbps. Reliance Communications Ltd also opposed TRAI's recommendation, saying "in case of fair usage plans, the subscriber remains into broadband services till the expiry of his assigned quota". It added that a service provider should be provided the freedom to throttle the speed "in order to avoid any misuse of the broadband service".

Industry bodies Association of Unified Telecom Service Providers of India and the Cellular Operators Association of India backed the telecom firms. "It cannot be the prerogative of the customer to keep on accessing data at the defined broadband speed," their statement said.

The SaveTheInternet coalition, run by a group of Internet activists, in a response to the consultation paper proposed a change in the definition of broadband. Currently, the minimum broadband speed mandated by TRAI is 512kbps. The group said it should be raised to 4 megabits per second (Mbps), referring to a recent study by Akamai that surveyed broadband speeds in a number of countries and found India's to be among the worst.

TRAI's consultation paper, with only 19 individual counter responses, hasn't quite elicited the kind of response as the one on Net neutrality, in spite of it being likely to affect pretty much anyone with a broadband connection. "This happened around the same time as the Net neutrality verdict, so it seems people missed it amid the celebrations," said Kiran Jonnalagadda, part of SaveTheInternet. Jonnalagadda called the telecom firms' contention "ridiculous".

Why haven't people protested in large numbers, though? "The media hasn't picked it up yet, but the Internet has," he remarked.

Sunil Abraham of the Bengaluru-based Centre for Internet and Society said it was "anti-consumer" to throttle speed to 64kbps. "Basically, telcos are using the excuse of the fringe phenomenon of bandwidth hogs to gouge all consumers. The regulator must ensure that the broadband connection is fast enough so that it can still be used for average usage such as video streaming, video calls, etc. even after the FUP limit has been crossed," he said.

Meanwhile, Internet forums like Reddit are witnessing a flurry of hostile comments against Airtel. And if that is any gauge of public sentiment, Airtel may find itself in the same situation as Facebook, which recently received much flak for its Free Basics initiative, which critics said violated Net neutrality.

Context and Background

This article was published on 14 March 2016, just over a month after TRAI’s landmark decision on 8 February 2016 to strike down Facebook’s Free Basics platform on net neutrality grounds. The Free Basics battle had mobilised an unprecedented level of public engagement with telecom regulation in India, generating millions of responses to TRAI’s earlier consultation and considerable media coverage. The broadband speed consultation running in parallel had attracted a fraction of that attention, and as Kiran Jonnalagadda notes, the timing worked against it — the net neutrality verdict had consumed the available bandwidth of public interest.

The substantive dispute is about what “unlimited” means in an FUP broadband plan. Telcos argued that unlimited data access at full speed was unsustainable and that heavy users were imposing costs on others, justifying a severe speed throttle after the FUP threshold. But 64 kbps — a speed broadly comparable to a slow dial-up connection from the late 1990s — would render modern internet services essentially non-functional. Video streaming requires a minimum of around 1–3 Mbps; video calls need at least 500 kbps; even basic web browsing on modern pages can be painfully slow at 64 kbps. Abraham’s point is precise: the problem is not that throttling exists, but that telcos were seeking to set the post-FUP floor so low as to make the connection commercially useless, effectively converting “unlimited” plans into capped ones while retaining the unlimited pricing justification.

The SaveTheInternet coalition’s counter-proposal to raise the minimum broadband definition from 512 kbps to 4 Mbps is a separate but related argument: it targets the floor for any broadband service, not just post-FUP speeds. The Akamai data they cited was accurate — India ranked poorly in global broadband speed surveys at this time — and the 4 Mbps figure reflected a more realistic threshold for the kind of internet use that had become standard. The article captures a moment when the infrastructure and commercial terms of India’s broadband market were being actively contested across multiple simultaneous regulatory proceedings, with consumer groups and civil society organisations engaged on several fronts at once.