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I found this report from Akamai interesting and gives some insights into the state of Internet in India

· India ranked #20 globally for number of unique IP addresses seen by Akamai, with over 3 million IP’s

· India ranked #11 globally, with 1.60% of observed attack traffic

· India ranked #107 globally for average connection speed, at 898 Kbps

Highlights and trends from the report for India follow:

• Ranked #20 globally for number of unique IP addresses seen by Akamai, with over 3 million IP’s
• Up 52% year over year, and 17% from Q4 2008
• In comparison, United States was ranked #1 with 116.1 million unique IPs
• Ranked #107 globally for average connection speed, at 898 Kbps
• Globally, the average connection speed was approximately 1.7 Mbps
• The United States ranked #18 globally, with an average connection speed of 4.2 Mbps while South Korea ranked #1 with an average connection speed of 11 Mbps
• Ranked #11 globally in terms of attack traffic, with 1.60% of observed attack traffic
• In comparison, China was ranked #1 with 27.59% of observed attack traffic followed by the United States ranked #2 with 22.15% of observed attack traffic
• Ranked #148 globally for number of unique IP addresses per capita, with 0.0023
• Ranked #63 globally for high broadband adoption, with 0.91% of connections to Akamai at speeds over 5 Mbps
• Up 57% year over year, and up 63% from Q4, 2008
• Ranked #87 globally for broadband adoption, with 5.31% of connections to Akamai at speeds over 2 Mbps
• Down 33% year over year, and up 42% from Q4 2008
• Ranked #140 globally for broadband penetration, with 0.001broadband IPs per capita in Q1 2009
• Ranked #53 globally for narrowband adoption, with 23.2% of connections to Akamai at speeds below 256 Kbps
• Down 17% year over year and down 10% from Q4 2008
• Ranked #163 globally for narrowband penetration, with 0.0006 narrowband IP’s per capita in Q1 2009

Attack Traffic

During the first quarter of 2009, Akamai observed attack traffic originating from 68 unique countries around the world. The United States and China were the two largest attack traffic sources, accounting for nearly 50% of observed traffic in total. The top 10 ports saw approximately 90% of the observed attack traffic, with more two-thirds of the traffic likely related to the Conficker worm.

Connectivity

A number of new submarine cable projects were announced or deployed in the first quarter that are expected ultimately to improve Internet connectivity for countries in Africa, Europe, South America and the Caribbean, and Oceania. New WiMAX projects and deployments will bring broadband wireless connectivity to countries in Eastern Europe, Africa, Asia, and the former Soviet Union. Fiber-to-the-home efforts announced in the first quarter will benefit users in New Zealand, Australia, Bali, Latvia, Scotland, and England.

The first quarter also saw nominal advances in IPv6 adoption, including seven more country-level domains enabling their DNS servers for IPv6. In the United States, and countries around the globe, “stimulus funding” was allocated in the first quarter to help improve broadband availability in rural areas.

Broadband Connectivity
Through its globally-deployed server network, and by virtue of the billions of requests for Web content that it services on a daily basis, Akamai has developed a unique level of visibility into the connection speeds of those systems issuing the requests, and as such, of broadband adoption around the globe. Akamai observed a nearly five percent increase (from the fourth quarter of 2008) globally in the number of unique IP addresses connecting to Akamai’s network.

Current highlights and historical trends for average connection speeds on a global basis can be found in Akamai's data visualization tool, available at http://www.akamai.com/dv5. In the first quarter of 2009, one-fifth of the Internet connections around the world were at speeds of greater than 5 Mbps, a 5 percent increase from the prior quarter, and a nearly 30 percent increase over the same period last year. Globally, the average connection speed increased by approximately 11 percent, growing to 1.7 Mbps, and more than 120 countries had connection speeds under 1 Mbps.

Fastest Global Countries

From a global connection speed perspective, Japan unseated South Korea for the highest levels of “high broadband” (>5 Mbps) connectivity, though South Korea maintained the highest average connection speed, at 11 Mbps. For the first time since publishing the State of the Internet report in the first quarter of 2008, South Korea no longer had the largest percentage of connections to Akamai at speeds above 5 Mbps, with a significant 25% decline. Akamai also saw fewer unique IP addresses from South Korea during the first quarter, along with a lower average connection speed. The first place spot was taken by Japan, with 57% of connections to Akamai at high broadband levels. Nearly a third of Japan’s connections to Akamai are at speeds between 5-10 Mbps. Sweden showed a similar percentage of connections between 5-10 Mbps, while other countries in the top 10 saw levels below 30 percent.

Akamai's unique level of visibility into the connection speeds of systems issuing requests to the Akamai network has created a one-of-a-kind view into broadband adoption around the globe. Leveraging that data, Akamai's quarterly State of the Internet report identifies and compares Internet penetration and connections speeds in India with countries across the world. To learn more, and to access the archive of past reports, please visitwww.akamai.com/stateoftheinternet.

To download the figures from the Q1 2009 State of the Internet, please visit:http://wwwns.akamai.com/q109_soti_figures.zip

I found this interesting and useful post on BSNL Bangalore website explaining speed related queries its users have.

Speed performance of Dataone connection

Most of the broadband subscribers find it difficult to understand why they are not getting the desired speed as promised by the Service Provider. They simply wander and suspect that ISP is not providing the desired bandwidth. However there are lots of other factors contributing to poor performance of broadband connection even though full bandwidth is available and ADSL line is perfectly all right. This document summarizes various such reasons with performance figures collected from public Internet.

Bandwidth vs Throughput

The terms bandwidth and throughput are not same. Bandwidth is the rate at which information can be moved over a given connectivity whereas the throughput or speed normally we observe on browser window while downloading a file or through various speed test sites is the throughput of single TCP/IP connection. The throughput depends upon lot of other factors like Hardware, Operating System, latency etc. Therefore even if the enough bandwidth is available, you may feel that ISP is not providing the full bandwidth as promised.

Kbps Vs KBps

The bandwidth specified by ISP is Kilobits per second (Kbps). However Browsers and other file transfer agents tend to show speed in terms of KiloBytes per second. So 1KBps will mean 8Kbps. Some customers mistake KBps as Kbps and feel that they are not getting the desired speed.

Internet uses IP as the protocol for communicating, therefore, and in particular, TCP/IP. So your data is going over your DSL line via TCP/IP over PPPoE.

TCP and PPPoE will have overhead bytes which can vary from 5% to 25%, So you can expect up to 25% of your purchased speed at least when counting application data transfer rate. Making up a rule of thumb here: Given a broadband line speed, dividing by 8 and taking off 15% is a reasonable estimate of the maximum likely data download speeds (in bytes of data) you will manage to get.

The ideal Situation

In an ideal situation, you should be able to see in your browser download window, during a sustained transfer, a rate equal to your purchased speed, divided by 8 (to get bytes), less 15% (TCP/IP and PPPoE header overhead). It is unlikely you will ever see that speed though, and the reasons given below explain why.

1. Badly configured PC

The single most common cause of poor performance is a windows PC that is in poor shape for broadband.

1. Insufficient memory (128mb is really the lower limit now for any windows install),

2. Underpowered processors;

3. An aging and unstable windows installation,

4. Accumulation of shareware, particularly SPYWARE and MALWARE - Over-clocked motherboards that cause unusual problems. The problem gets intensified if connection is shared by multiple computers. The unwanted traffic chokes the Ethernet port of the modem and you may find the speed worse than that of dial-up connection.

The list is endless. If you experience frequent application crashes or blue-screens, the disk churns like crazy as you switch between applications, windows reports warnings about virtual memory becoming low, pop-ups keep happening, and your modem shows a lot of flashing lights indicating "data" even when you are not doing anything, then you've not got a stable system for experiencing top speed, especially from the point of view of the browser!

2. Many servers cannot currently offer high speeds to you.

Many servers would not provide the "broadband experience" to any user who thought they had speeds of 768kbps or more. Many servers offer speeds far slower than even this, because they are busy, and you are sharing their bandwidth with hundreds of other people. Even some of the most popular sites provide throughput as low as 100 Kbps regardless of any bandwidth available.

3. Latency

Although it may seem that the information traveling at the speed of light should not be matter of consideration, but surprisingly it is. The round trip delay (to & fro traveling time of information flow) from India to US will vary 300 to 400 ms on fibre links. For satellite links it will be even high. This is the major cause for reduction in throughput because of TCP/IP limitations as explained below.

TCP/IP limitations and its effect on throughput

TCP/IP implementations typically have a limit on the maximum throughput possible from a station. Why? Simply because the TCP/IP stack has a maximum outstanding amount of data that can be in transit from one point to another without acknowledgement of delivery.

In practise, as mentioned above, most TCP/IP stacks run with an 8 KB maximum window size (Linux, Windows 9x, Windows NT, etc. Windows 2000 has a 16 KB maximum receive window size. Here is an example on how adverse impact of TCP/IP limitations can be on throughout (taken from a study published on Internet).

This is a simplified model of TCP/IP over Ethernet behaviour of a single TCP connection intended to provide insight into throughput limitations of TCP/IP due to network transit latency. In the model, TCP/IP sends the maximum TCP receive window size worth of application data (filling the maximum possible receive buffer), then waits for a single acknowledgement for the entire max. window size burst. The model also assumes that the instant the acknowledgement is sent, the data is emptied from the receive buffer and the entire window size is again fully available.
This latency vs Speed table assumes the all other factors in ideal conditions like No data loss All datagrams of Maximum size, No TCP/IP slow start, Computer hardware/software and network equipment can support peak TCP allowed data rates etc.
Round Trip Latency (2T)	Maximum User Data Throughput (64KB Window)	Maximum User Data Throughput (WinNT,Win9x)	Maximum User Data Throughput (Win2K)
150 mS	2,555 Kbps	445 Kbps	851 Kbps
200 mS	2,054 Kbps	338 Kbps	653 Kbps
250 mS	1,718 Kbps	272 Kbps	529 Kbps
300 mS	1,476 Kbps	228 Kbps	445 Kbps
350 mS	1,294 Kbps	196 Kbps	384 Kbps
400 mS	1,152 Kbps	172 Kbps	338 Kbps
420 mS	1,103 Kbps	164 Kbps	322 Kbps
440 mS	1,059 Kbps	157 Kbps	308 Kbps
450 mS	1,038 Kbps	153 Kbps	302 Kbps
470 mS	998 Kbps	147 Kbps	289 Kbps
480 mS	980 Kbps	144 Kbps	283 Kbps
500 mS	944 Kbps	138 Kbps	272 Kbps

Source: http://www.babinszki.com/Networking

You can see how badly the throughput is affected because of high latency and TCP/IP limitations and that is the reason why customers having WIN98/ NT/2000 machines may get speed as low as 130 Kbps that too if every thing else (i.e. Good line condition, PC is configured for optimum performance and free from infection) is in ideal condition.

4. Upload vs Download speed

The upload and download speed in ADSL connections are not same. Normally ISP will specify the download speed only. The upload speed will be less than the download speed and so if your application needs more upload speed, you may not experience the desired throughput. BSNL Dataone connection is configured for 256kbps upload speed for all the customers.

5. Poor ADSL line:

Some times the ADSL line conditions becomes poor due to various reasons like poor insulation in underground cable, Interference, loose connection, improper house wiring etc.. This results in poor speed especially for higher bandwidth customers.

The ADSL modem supplied by BSNL for Dataone connection has got advance functionality, which gives fair idea about ADSL line condition. The subscribers can login to http://192.168.1.1 and see the various parameters displayed on home page. The most critical parameter is SNR (Signal to Noise Ratio), in normal line SNR value should be around 12 or more.

Conclusion:

Now you can understand why you do not get the desired speed in your broadband connection. Most of the content being accessed by users is located out side the country that means a high latency varying from 300 to 450ms (After all information has to pass through several hops and it can not travel faster than light). Therefore if you are having Win98 PC you can expect the speed throughput of 130 to 170 Kbps only. If some body subscribers for 2Mbps connection and even if he is having latest machine and operating system, still he will not get more than 1Mbps throughput from International sites because of TCP/IP limitations.

Some software programs are available over Internet, which modify the TCP window size of Windows machine, but you have to use those on your own risk. Some download accelerator software programs are also available which increase the speed by establishing multiple connections simultaneously. In fact the bandwidth plans of higher than 512 Kbps are assumed to be shared by multiple computers for utilizing the full bandwidth.

The most important thing is that you can not leave your PC unsecured to allow viruses, Spy wares and worms to get into your PC which will not only make your connection slow but cost you heavily as all the bytes upstream or downstream through ADSL connection are counted as Usage data.

More Sources:

http://www.tcpipguide.com/free/t_NetworkPerformanceIssuesandConcepts.htm