Lord of the Web

Airtel is one of the leading ISPs in India. In a move that is bound to have some heated arguments from the broadband aficionados in the country ( which includes me!), Airtel has revised its Fair Usage Policy stating that the download speeds would be cut for “unlimited” plan users when their downloads ( in GBs) exceeds a particular limit.

According to the Fair Usage Policy, the speed would be cut by 50% when the downloads exceed 40GB limit that has been put in place for now. Airtel says that this will help people who need sporadic high levels of usage ( who, Airtel claims, is the majority of users) to get the bandwidth that would be clogged by full time downloaders.

This comes as a real blow to the heavy users, but I must say that Airtel’s reasoning for imposing such restrictions is rather justified. But, Airtel must make sure that the restrictions are clearly communicated to the users. I have come across many Airtel “unlimited” who are not aware of this development. In a country where even 128Kbps internet is sold to the customers as “broadband”, TRAI ( which defined a minimum of 256kbps for broadband) must make sure that the ISPs don’t take any undue advantage of the customers.