Looking Forward: 2015 - Waiting for 4G

We've come a long way since the days of the creaking (literally!) dial-up modems, but internet speeds (at least for home users) in India are still an embarrassment.

OOKLA, the people behind the popular Speedtest testing platform for internet speeds, ranks India at 136 (of I94 countries) on its Household Download Index, which measures the average download speed at homes. The latest figures peg the country's download speed at six Mbps, compared with the global average of 21.5 Mbps. By upload speeds, India ranks 105th with an average speed of 3.8 Mbps, compared with the global average of 9.8 Mbps.

Considering that last-mile connectivity has been a consistent problem in the country and the explosion of mobile telephony in the country, one expects India to do better on the mobile front. But here, too, India ranks 101st among 114 nations on the Mobile Download  Index, with an average download speed of 2.7 Mbps, compared with a global average of 10.9 Mbps. By uploads, its worse - at 104, with a speed of 0.8 Mbps, compared with the global average of 4.5 Mbps.

But, hope seems round the corner: 4G or fourth generation of mobile communications has been rolled out in select cities and is likely to see a pan-India rollout in 2015. Theoretically, 4G promises download speeds of up to 100 Mbps, compared with the speed of 21 Mbps that 3G supports.

What would such speeds mean for consumers? Well, they can download about 10 films in less than 30 minutes or watch high-definition videos on YouTube without buffering of any sort.

On a recent visit to Kolkata, I had the opportunity to try out Airtel's 4G LTE services, available in this city. What impressed me most was the ability to forward a full high-definition (full HD)  Planet Earth video while watching it and carrying on watching it with practically no delay. After a point of time I was actually missing the familiar "Buffering" notification!

If that is what one can do with full HD videos, one cannot but wonder if 4K streaming could be a possibility soon. Of course, we watched the video on a laptop connected to a 4G dongle, but one can also connect wirelessly to a wireless router (according to the OOKLA Speedtest, I got download speeds of 18.36 Mbps, with upload speeds of 5.94 Mbps). On the 4G LTE iPhone 5c, we got download speeds of 14.58 Mbps and upload speeds of 1.82 Mbps.

As for the costs involved, well they're comparable to 3G plans. A caveat: While it's great to have such download speeds, after looking through 4G plans offered in India, I couldn't find one that offered unlimited downloads. So essentially after one has exhausted one's data limit, one would in some more time be back at 2G speeds. And with the speeds promised, such packs would be over in no time.

But with both Airtel and Reliance JIO gearing up to roll out services across the country, one can only hope 4G doesn't go the way of 16Mbps broadband - an expensive proposition with speeds plummeting to 512 kbps as soon as the Fair Usage Policy kicks in.