The sad state of Broadband in India

Business world this week has come out with a story about the sad state of Broadband in India.It states how Bandwidth squeeze and slow broadband growth is thwarting multi-billion-dollar businesses such as music & movie downloads, e-education,gaming and telemedicine. This could cripple India's high-growth economy.Some interesting facts from the broadband report are

• Broadband rates in India is among the most expensive in world at Rs 3300 for 2 MBPS it is 4 times as expensive compared to that of Korea or 3.3 times that of USA
• Japanese Broadband is 240 times faster than Indian broadband
• Nearly 40% of the optic fibre laid for broadband is not being used
• India is losing business worth $90 billion a year due to slow growth in broadband
  
• India had just 2.52 million subscribers of broadband in 2006-07 compared to 60.30 million in USA but it is growing at a heartening rate of nearly 93% however in India broadband is defined at least 256KBPS while for rest of world it is at least 2mbps.
• Hope comes in the form of technologies like Wi-fi and Wi-Max which can provide broadband access at 20-70 mbps however the spectrum required for it has not been opened

BW calls India's broadband growth as the Hindu speed of Internet access in reference to India's past Hindu growth rate of 3-4% for nearly 50 years which derailed us .You can read the complete story on India's broadband state here .Lastly i am typing this on probably one of the fastest broadband Internet in India as rated by speedtest however even this VSNL connection doesn't guarantee me gud experience in high multimedia rich websites or fast downloads from Internet.Interestingly speedtest rates India's average broadband speed as 463 KBPS.I wonder whether real high speed broadband acess will ever become a reality