> 35$ for 1TB up/down, 150 Mbps. Available in all major cities. Good enough?
But that's affordable for a very thin slice of the population. Remember that India's average nominal income, i.e., not PPP-adjusted, is $140 per month. Also, this only works in the better-off areas of the "major cities" (Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, Bangalore, Hyderabad and similar) -- there's a lot of the population who live outside these cities.
Considering local factors, wired internet is a marker of being upper middle class, or even 'rich', and living in a great residential area in a top-tier city.
Thanks. I suppose my question was less about the affordability of a landline connection, but consumption of. Interesting that you said its a marker of wealth - but are you essentially saying that for everyone else it's not that common. At the heart of what I'm asking is: Did India skip this generation of high-landline consumption, and jump straight to mobile internet?
Jio's rival Airtel owns satellite/cable tv platforms and even supplies wired internet in parts of major cities. No one with any ambition has really tried wired internet in India -- for a long time the only way to get it was via the government-run telecoms provider (who are -- surprise! -- not very good).
Jio's parent company produces a lot of movies in India and in Hollywood, including Arrival, Ready Player One, Ghost in the Shell, Lincoln, etc. They know the value of a converged platform that serves data + video. And they don't have a satellite/cable tv network because the Jio vision was all-digital, all IP. And they have been building the backhaul to do this at scale across India (lots of planning applications are online) and are now slowly trialling Jio GigaFibre (a Gigabit Home Fibre service) in parts of India.
What I don't know is if they can turn these trials into a compellingly priced proposition Indians will pay for (and get rid of their cable tv subscriptions for -- and cable is very popular in India, even wired cable tv -- even in low-income neighbourhoods. So clearly India can solve the last-mile wiring problem if they want to). But they have been able to do it with 4G and I suspect they wouldn't trial a Gigabit fibre product if they didn't have a proposition in mind.
Incidentally if you're wondering: "won't 5G make wired internet redundant" -- India has lots of cell towers but also lots of people connecting to each of those towers. This means that often speeds during the daytime are pathetic. I personally used Jio and Airtel while visiting India recently in May, and even web pages had trouble loading (on both networks) in the afternoon^. I suspect the effective bandwidth available per subscriber in even small Indian cities (1M would be small in India) would be quite variable, and certainly small during busy periods.
Sorry if this is too much detail. I just find the ambition involved in bringing internet at scale to an entire country (especially one the size of India!) endlessly fascinating.
^ May is 'peak summer' in India, and the afternoon sees very few people on the roads and the bazaars are deserted as people rest or take a siesta. I suspect internet usage goes through the roof then.
> 35$ for 1TB up/down, 150 Mbps. Available in all major cities. Good enough?
But that's affordable for a very thin slice of the population. Remember that India's average nominal income, i.e., not PPP-adjusted, is $140 per month. Also, this only works in the better-off areas of the "major cities" (Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, Bangalore, Hyderabad and similar) -- there's a lot of the population who live outside these cities.
Considering local factors, wired internet is a marker of being upper middle class, or even 'rich', and living in a great residential area in a top-tier city.