Telecom operators want to limit internet speeds to 64kbps as part of their fair use plans

While the net neutrality debate in India appears to have been settled, internet activists and telecom companies may soon come to blows again.

Only this time there wasn’t half as much noise from Internet users – or the media – as there was with Facebook’s Free Basics plan.

On February 10, two days after India’s Telecom Regulatory Authority (Trai) invalidated Free Basics, Bharti Airtel Ltd said telecom companies should be allowed to cap speeds at 64 kilobits per second (kbps) under fair use plans (FUP).

This was in response to Trai’s consultation paper which, among other things, recommended that the download speed on a broadband connection should not be less than 512 kbps. FUP are data plans under which users can use unlimited data. The problem, however, is that after a certain point the speed drops. The idea is to prevent a few people with high bandwidth from interfering with other people’s Internet use.

Airtel argued that “customers misuse the minimum broadband speed provision and tend to abuse the data allowance within their allowance,” which it said leads to higher costs for other customers. It said Trai should not set a minimum speed threshold and if necessary, it should be fixed at 64 kbps. Reliance Communications Ltd also opposed Trai’s advisory, saying that “in fair use plans, the subscriber remains on broadband services until the quota allocated to him expires.” He added that service providers should be given the freedom to limit speeds “to avoid misuse of the broadband service.”

Industry bodies Unified Telecom Service Providers Association of India and Cellular Operators Association of India have supported telecom companies. “Continuing to access data at a given broadband speed cannot be a customer privilege,” the statement said.

The SaveTheInternet coalition, led by a group of internet activists, proposed changing the definition of broadband internet in response to the consultation document. Currently, the minimum broadband speed required by Trai is 512 kbps. The group said it should be increased to 4 megabits per second (Mbps), referring to a recent study by Akamai that examined broadband speeds in multiple countries and found India to be among the worst.

Trai’s consultation paper, with only 19 individual counter-responses, did not trigger the kind of reaction that the one on net neutrality did, even though it is likely to affect almost everyone with a broadband connection. “It happened around the same time as the net neutrality ruling, so it seems like people weren’t participating in the festivities,” said Kiran Jonnalagadda of SaveTheInternet. Jonnalagadda called the telecom companies’ claims “ridiculous.”

But why didn’t people protest en masse? “The media hasn’t noticed it yet, but the Internet has,” he noted.

Sunil Abraham of the Benglauru-based Center for Internet and Society said the 64kbps speed limit was “anti-consumer”. “Essentially, telecom operators are using the excuse of a marginal bandwidth loss phenomenon to deceive all consumers. The regulator must ensure that the broadband connection is fast enough to continue to be used for average applications such as video streaming, video calling, etc., even after the FUP limit has been exceeded,” he said.

Meanwhile, there is an avalanche of hostile comments against Airtel on online forums such as Reddit. And this is a measure of social mood. Airtel may find itself in the same situation as Facebook, which recently faced a lot of criticism for its Free Basics initiative, which critics say violates net neutrality.