"So the speed to dollar ratio is higher in North America."
LIRNEasia a regional telecom policy research body, has been running a study on South Asian broadband internet usage from 2007.
Asian telcos despite a lower tariff structure still makes money due to lower quality, the study has found. In countries like Bangladesh which has one of the lowest tariffs in the world average revenue per user (ARPU) is just two dollars per month.
"Costs are really driven down that's why they can make money on five dollar revenues," Helani Galpaya, chief operating officer at LIRNEasia said.
"Profits can be made due to lower quality of the network."
The LIRNEasia study compares broadband packages of Asian cities such as New Delhi, Chennai, Bangalore, with North American broadband packages in cities such as Denver, Buffalo and Ottawa.
"There are large pipes going between Trans Atlantic and Trans Pacific," Wattegama said.
"Broadband is not the last mile from the ISP to the user, broadband is your link to the destinations server
The study showed, the four sample North American packages when accessing an international servers delivered speeds of 40 to 100 kbps (kilobits per second) per US dollar.
While South Asian packages could not deliver more than 30 kbps, Timothy Gonsalves, professor of the department of computer science and engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras (IIT Madras) said.
The probable reason is South Asia does not have the same infrastructure as North America. The situation is made worse if the facilities are shared among a large number of users, Gonsalves said.
In a joint study conducted by LIRNEasia and TeNet (Telecommunications and Network Group), an academic body at IIT Madras, had recommended Indian Telecom regulators to follow the British specification of 20 connections per link for businesses and 50 for residential.
However South Asian service providers have adopted 30 connections per link for business, and had stuck to their recommendations on household broadband connectivity, researchers said.
"In Sri Lanka, India and Bangladesh users are getting less (broadband speeds) than what the mobile companies promise," Wattegama said.
"The pipes (broadband) coming to Asia is very small compared with the developed world. It's like driving a sophisticated car in the superhighway with cart wheels."
He said most South Asian websites are hosted on remote servers located in developed countries.
Some South Asian broadband service providers promise speeds up to two mega bits per second and only deliver 40 to 50 percent of what's 'advertised', Wattegama said.
"This makes accessibility of local sites difficult when availability of international bandwidth is poor," Wattegama said. "Broadband has to be over128kbps which is dialup speeds, and we recommended at least 250kbps."
Limitations in international bandwidth increases the 'round trip time' for data packets to remotely hosted servers, Wattemaga said.
"The four North American broadband servers tested reported round trip times to a server located in Europe varying from 100 milliseconds to 200 milliseconds, "Gonsalves said.
"The packages from South Asia were above the ideal 300 millisecond limit."
The quality of broadband of the developed world and the developing world can be experienced when downloading real time videos, Ashok Jhunjhunwala, head of TeNeT said.
" I can watch the NDTV (Indian tv news channel) program live in a hotel room in an unknown town on Europe," Juhnjuhnwala quipped.
"I can't watch the same program in my own office in India without watching it for 30 seconds and waiting it to load for 20 seconds,"
"The service provider says it's a 40 mega bit line, I don't want to say who the service provider is because probably I'm in the board of it."
All Rights Reserved.