This is one thing that we all talk about all the time, and now we all have started taking it for granted. Prabu mentions about flash heavy pages that look good but takes ages to download. Ashok mentions about the vsnl connection that only gets slower by time. I remember those thousands of times when I keep staring at a page to load and finally give up and forget it. It is really frustrating. But what is even more frustrating is the reasons behind this bandwidth crunch, which is more political than else.
There is a great lot of fat pipes that carry gigabytes of data every second under the Indian ocean. And they even run very close to the coastal lines of India. But we can't access them simply because we have a government that does not want you to be happy. For the extra revenue that they generate by the control, they don't really care how happy you are. And everyone knows how much vsnl sucks, and still we need to stick on to them.
It is only recently that I became aware of the fact that I used take these problems as granted. I realized that when I saw bandwidths like more than 100kilobytes per seconds(Normally when we say 128kbps, it is bits, not bytes/sec) being normal. I was amused to see my downloads of 100s of KBs complete in hardly a few seconds. It is as if you copy from a neighbouring machine. Dunno when we will manage to see such cool speeds.
There are more such things: Distance from Singapore to US is more than double the distance between Singapore and India. But calling India on telephone costs double than calling US because those countries are directly interlinked. And again, it is easy to link these countries directly, government permits, because there are lots of optic fibre lines already running along the Indian ocean. But unless some serious policy changes happen(we are only making a beginning these days) we will be in a timezone ten years behind rest of the world.
