Elon Musk's Starlink’s ₹840 Internet: Affordable Plans, Pricey Setup

Reports suggest that Starlink may introduce unlimited data plans in India at a promotional price of under ₹840 per month. This aggressive pricing strategy aims to attract a large user base quickly, despite high spectrum and licensing costs.

However, the hardware costs could be a hurdle—Starlink kits are priced between ₹21,300 and ₹32,400, making them significantly more expensive than traditional broadband options in India. While Eutelsat OneWeb and Jio-SES have already secured regulatory approvals, Starlink is still awaiting final clearance from IN-SPACe, India's space regulatory body.

Another challenge is capacity constraints—India's geographic satellite coverage is estimated at only 0.7% to 0.8% of global satellite capacity, meaning only 700 to 800 satellites would cover the country at any given time.

If Starlink manages to overcome these hurdles, it could be a game-changer for rural and remote connectivity in India.

Starlink is still awaiting final approval from IN-SPACe, India’s space regulatory body, before it can officially launch.

The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) has proposed steep fees, including a ₹500 annual urban user charge, a 4% levy on adjusted gross revenue (AGR), and a minimum annual fee of ₹3,500 per MHz of satellite spectrum.

India’s geographic satellite coverage is estimated at only 0.7% to 0.8% of global satellite capacity, meaning only 700 to 800 satellites would cover the country at any given time.

Eutelsat OneWeb and Jio-SES have already secured regulatory approvals and could challenge Starlink’s market entry.

Despite the ₹840 monthly plan, satellite broadband in India is still 7 to 18 times more expensive than conventional fiber broadband services.

A Study Finds that 53% Indians Faced Online Abuse on Social Media Platforms

#BeAware, a study conducted by Social Media Matters, Do Your Thing and Institute for Governance, Policies, and Politics revealed that 53% Indians have faced online abuse on Social Media Platforms. Out of these, only 66% reported the incident to the platform, from which 52% reported the cyber crime to the police as well. 

Nearly half of the population of planet earth is actively using the digital spaces to communicate and connect with the global audience. #BeAware studied the awareness and perception of community guidelines and social media reporting mechanisms present on social media. The questionnaire included open and close-ended questions for the participants to share their experiences. A total of 1067 users participated in the study from across India between the period of December 2019 to January 2020.

Institute for Governance, Policies & Politics (IGPP) in their statement said that the research study was done to understand the efficacy of reporting mechanism and community guidelines of social media platforms. It has analysed the responses of nearly a thousand participants based on their experience, perception, and feedback particularly on the issue of hate speech, online abuse, and online financial fraud.

The respondents are covered across states, age-groups, and gender. It is found that online users in the age-group of 22-25 are more exposed followed by above 30. Furthermore, nearly half of the participants are female and transgender who faced such negative experience largely and also reported the case more than male members. However, most netizens are of the opinion that there is a need to raise awareness of reporting mechanism and community guidelines of social media platforms through various methods such as online safety workshop.

The study also stated that 53% of Indian Online Users are not aware of the existing community guidelines by Social Media Platforms. These guidelines primarily set the tone and state policies of the social media platform to deal with violation of rules, illicit cyber behaviour, etc. on social media platforms. 62% of the respondents said that they are aware of the reporting mechanisms but a large number i.e. 73% users recommending escalation of initiatives to raise awareness about community guidelines and reporting mechanisms. 

Commenting on the outcomes of this study, Amitabh Kumar, Founder of Social Media Matters quoted, “More than half the users on social media platforms have faced some kind of abuse, this is not acceptable! To realize our dream for #DigitalIndia it is essential that we make cyberspaces safe. There is a lot of work to be done by Social Media Platforms to achieve this."

53% of the respondents also believed that some improvisations are required to build an efficient reporting mechanism on the Social Media Platforms. #BeAware also gathered user’s recommendations to raise awareness regarding the reporting mechanism of social media in India. 24% respondents believed that offline awareness will help in letting users know about them, 23% believed that online awareness will do the needful and 23% of the respondents selected a combination of various methods to increase awareness.

About Social Media Matters:

A team of Young, Feminist, Social Media Ninjas, working for Social Change. True believers in technology we have been empowering diverse groups. We specialize in all aspects of online safety, from policy to capacity building. We have done Internet safety workshops across India and the globe, created innovative tech solutions such for positive use of social media.

Reliance Jio Fails To Live Up To Expectations and Promises

India's richest man Mukesh Ambani's Reliance Industries Ltd. announced the commercial availability of Jio, its 4G LTE only network, in a grand affair earlier this month which is endorsed and advertised by none other than Prime Minister of India -- Narendra Modi himself, however, in less than two weeks since the its launch, Jio customers have started to complain about poor download speeds they are getting on their smartphones. Many say that Jio is failing to provide speed of 2Mbps mark.

Reliance Jio’s official Facebook and Twitter pages are flooded by users who are dissatisfied with the Jio network’s performance. Amusingly enough, the vast majority of complaints are either about poor performance, or the inability to get a SIM card.

@JioCare Guys speed is worst than 3G,My Airtel 3G gives better speed and Airtel 4G speeds as in excess of 35MBps all the time, Jio hardly

— Nilesh Patel (@nileshpatelm) September 13, 2016

Reliance Jio speeds just name sake now getting above 40 Mbps speedtest but even twitter images don't load properly! pic.twitter.com/FF4TopPhEJ

— Ranjit (@geekyranjit) September 9, 2016

#Jio, despite impediments from competitors, is commited to offer quality voice & data on #4G #VoLTE. pic.twitter.com/HlmMDq3XiX

— Parimal Nathwani (@mpparimal) September 11, 2016

The issue of low data speed could be the enormous data usage by users which might have not anticipated by the company during its test. At the time of launch, Reliance Industries Chairman Mukesh Ambani noted that Jio was handling a monthly data usage of over 250 million GB during the test period, which had nearly two million users. With Jio opening the floodgates to everyone, the data usage is likely to have sky rocketed.

Notably, as a welcome offer Jio is offering 4GB of LTE data per day for free to all its new users which will last until the end of this year. The move has naturally received an overwhelming response from people, with many lining up outside stores in a hope to get a Jio SIM card.

@JioCare Check Jio speed in Yerwada Pune , my number is 7020887824.. Disappointed :( pic.twitter.com/w1itR8Iu9S

— sudeep pimpale (@sudeeppimpale) September 13, 2016

During the Preview Offer period of Jio, seeing speeds between 20Mbps and 25Mbps was the norm in Mumbai and Bengaluru. Now, speed needle is not even crossing 2Mbps mark. Over an extended period of usage, typical speeds have stayed under 3.5Mbps.

@reliancejio @JioCare @jio here is your 20 mbps speed .. 👃❌ pic.twitter.com/a4E5Vr9JRl

— Shashi kant (@shashi2134) September 13, 2016

IAMAI Suggests Ways To Spread Internet Across India

The internet wave is spreading in India like a wild fire. It's no secret that the country is currently the third largest internet user base but considering its population and size, a lot more can be and needs to be done.

According to the current statistics available with us, India currently has the third largest internet user base in the world. Further, the total number of internet users keeps increasing with each passing year. According to figures, the number of Internet users in India rose from 300 million in December 2014 to a whopping 402 million by December last year. According to various industry experts, this number can be expected to reach 462 million by the month of June this year.

Another trend which has seen an upward trajectory is the swelling number of Mobile internet users. According to figures available, the mobile internet user base in urban India has crossed over the 306 million figures in the year 2015, making it a leap of 65%. The rural India user base registered a growth of 99% at 87 million by the end of December last year.

Don't let these aforementioned figures fool you. India for sure is doing great when it comes to the user base number, but when the discussion moves to internet penetration, the figures aren't that glossy at all. In terms of internet penetration, India stands at a very low 21%. This figure is far behind USA's 86.8%, Brazil's 53.5% and China's 46%.

In order to provide India with some suggestions and recommendations to catch up with its counterparts in the Internet penetration race, Industry body Internet and Mobile Association of India also famously known as the IAMAI has come up a report on the same.

According to the report, one basic reason for slow internet penetration in the country is the wide variety of local languages being practiced in the country. India is a land of varied cultures which come with their own varied and unique languages. This is where the Internet lacks. Most of the content being produced nowadays on the Internet is in English, which proves to be of no use to people who understand, speak and write their local language only.

"Accessing the internet in local language broadly has two challenges. The first challenge is generating content in local languages and popularising such content for broader adoption. The second challenge is on the technical front, pertaining to availability of Indian scripts for generating digital content," the report reads.

Although the Indian government and various private organisations like Wikipedia, Google and Facebook have understood this problem and have come up with local language content, still the availability of this content remains extremely low when compared to other languages. For example, statistically comparing, the Sanskrit Wikipedia has only 11,000 articles, while the Hindi one stands at around 22,000 Wiki pages. On the other hand, the German Wikipedia has 1.79 million pages and 55,000 for a small European country like Estonia. Shockingly, Indian languages occupies less than 0.1% of the content currently on the world wide web.

According to the IAMAI, the number of web users in India can increase significantly if the content available on the internet is accessible to people in their own local languages.

The report further goes a step ahead and identifies the various stakeholders who can be financially benefitted while bringing the local languages content on the Internet to the consumers. According to it, if the Indian language book publishing industry decides to moves its services and products online, they can create a digital opportunity worth nearly a whopping $7 billion for not only the content providers but also the technology players. Further, the online medium will prove to be a much more cost efficient option for them to reach out to their regional language consumers in tier-2 and tier-3 cities than the traditional media that they make use of currently.

The various technological barriers relating to local language fonts and keyboards; the type of device and the subsequent software platform it operates on, is the main reason for the slow adoption of local languages content on the Internet.

The IAMAI report fully narrows down the key players and stakeholders in the ecosystem; takes a serious note of the various developments that have taken place in this regard and also mentions the various future projects in the pipeline, and identifies the various challenges that are currently restricting the Internet proliferation in the country.

IAMAI Suggests Ways To Spread Internet Across India

The internet wave is spreading in India like a wild fire. It's no secret that the country is currently the third largest internet user base but considering its population and size, a lot more can be and needs to be done.

According to the current statistics available with us, India currently has the third largest internet user base in the world. Further, the total number of internet users keeps increasing with each passing year. According to figures, the number of Internet users in India rose from 300 million in December 2014 to a whopping 402 million by December last year. According to various industry experts, this number can be expected to reach 462 million by the month of June this year.

Another trend which has seen an upward trajectory is the swelling number of Mobile internet users. According to figures available, the mobile internet user base in urban India has crossed over the 306 million figures in the year 2015, making it a leap of 65%. The rural India user base registered a growth of 99% at 87 million by the end of December last year.

Don't let these aforementioned figures fool you. India for sure is doing great when it comes to the user base number, but when the discussion moves to internet penetration, the figures aren't that glossy at all. In terms of internet penetration, India stands at a very low 21%. This figure is far behind USA's 86.8%, Brazil's 53.5% and China's 46%.

In order to provide India with some suggestions and recommendations to catch up with its counterparts in the Internet penetration race, Industry body Internet and Mobile Association of India also famously known as the IAMAI has come up a report on the same.

According to the report, one basic reason for slow internet penetration in the country is the wide variety of local languages being practiced in the country. India is a land of varied cultures which come with their own varied and unique languages. This is where the Internet lacks. Most of the content being produced nowadays on the Internet is in English, which proves to be of no use to people who understand, speak and write their local language only.

"Accessing the internet in local language broadly has two challenges. The first challenge is generating content in local languages and popularising such content for broader adoption. The second challenge is on the technical front, pertaining to availability of Indian scripts for generating digital content," the report reads.

Although the Indian government and various private organisations like Wikipedia, Google and Facebook have understood this problem and have come up with local language content, still the availability of this content remains extremely low when compared to other languages. For example, statistically comparing, the Sanskrit Wikipedia has only 11,000 articles, while the Hindi one stands at around 22,000 Wiki pages. On the other hand, the German Wikipedia has 1.79 million pages and 55,000 for a small European country like Estonia. Shockingly, Indian languages occupies less than 0.1% of the content currently on the world wide web.

According to the IAMAI, the number of web users in India can increase significantly if the content available on the internet is accessible to people in their own local languages.

The report further goes a step ahead and identifies the various stakeholders who can be financially benefitted while bringing the local languages content on the Internet to the consumers. According to it, if the Indian language book publishing industry decides to moves its services and products online, they can create a digital opportunity worth nearly a whopping $7 billion for not only the content providers but also the technology players. Further, the online medium will prove to be a much more cost efficient option for them to reach out to their regional language consumers in tier-2 and tier-3 cities than the traditional media that they make use of currently.

The various technological barriers relating to local language fonts and keyboards; the type of device and the subsequent software platform it operates on, is the main reason for the slow adoption of local languages content on the Internet.

The IAMAI report fully narrows down the key players and stakeholders in the ecosystem; takes a serious note of the various developments that have taken place in this regard and also mentions the various future projects in the pipeline, and identifies the various challenges that are currently restricting the Internet proliferation in the country.

Govt. Censored GitHub, Vimeo & 30 Other Websites in India

Multiple reports are coming in about an extremely unusual bout of Internet censoring in India. Sites like GitHub, Vimeo, DailyMotion, Pastebin etc have been blocked by various ISPs across India on the orders of Modi-led Government.

In this bizarre Internet censorship of Indian govt., DoT (Department of Telecom) has issued a notice to various Internet Service Providers in India to block a total of 32 miscellaneous websites in their network. The notice doesn’t state the reason for this move.

Insane! Govt orders blocking of 32 websites including @internetarchive @vimeo @github @pastebin #censorship #FoEx pic.twitter.com/F75ngSGohJ

— Pranesh Prakash (@pranesh_prakash) December 31, 2014

The above tweet was made public by Pranesh Pakesh, a director at the Centre for Internet and Society in Bangalore.

In a recent update about blocking these 32 website in India, The head of the Bharatiya Janata political party has claimed that the sites were listed because they content from ISIS.

Gupta added that those sites which cooperate and remove the suspected ISIS content will be unblocked. Nonetheless, looking in from the outside, it certainly seems like the issue could have been handled in a clearer way that didn’t involved issuing blanket censorship blocks.

Most of the websites in blocking provided by govt. like GitHub, Archive.org are as harmless as PMO India's own website and people are still wandering about the reason for this kind of bizarre censorship. Notably, Github is a site that is used by every 2nd software engineer in the world and consider as back-bone of tech-startups of India.

Github, Vimeo, Dailymotion, Archive.org are used by millions across India and have nothing to do with such malpractices and the censorship of these sites is extremely surprising. While Github is ranked 101 in the word among millions of sites worldwide, Vimeo is ranked 119.

Ironically, Indian govt. in November'14 announced that it is planning to create Github like repository of software that can be created collaboratively and most recently appointed Slideshare co-founder Amit Ranjan to head this open source project. And now this move of government is opposing its own ideas.

Lets hope that Modi-led NDA Government realizes their blunder and works on revoking the censorship as soon as possible.

Mumbai & Delhi Have Highest Number of Internet Users In India

Mumbai with 16.4 million internet users is the top city with most internet users, followed by Delhi with 12.15 million internet users in the country which has over 243 million web users, a study by Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI) and IMRB has found.

Mumbai saw the Internet user base growing to about 16.4 million in October this year from 12 million in the same month last year.

With 50% Year-on-Year (y-o-y) growth, Delhi however registered the highest growth of internet users among all the top cities in India. Mumbai with 37% y-o-y growth is second while Bangalore with a y-o-y growth of 36% is third. Hyderabad and Pune, with a growth of 34% each are at fourth while Kolkata and Ahmedabad with 33% each are at fifth position. Chennai with 24% has registered the lowest growth rate among the top eight cities.

Below is list of cities by number of Internet users in 2014:

Rank	City	No. of users
1	Mumbai	16.4 million
2	Delhi	12.15 million
3	Kolkata	6.27 million
4	Bangalore	5.99 million
5	Chennai	5.58 million

Overall, the top 4 metros have a 23% penetration of Internet Users in India. The other 4 Metros have 11% penetration of Internet Users, with Bangalore registering the highest growth.

Among the smaller metros with a population of more than 1 million, Surat, Jaipur, Lucknow, Vadodara and Nagpur are the top five cities with highest number of internet users.

The small metros constitute 11% of the overall internet users in India, with top five small metros comprising 6% of the total Internet users in India.

With 243 million internet user India is third in World rankings in terms of no. of internet users however in terms if internet penetration India stands down below at 146th position with just 19% penetration.

India has slowest Internet speed in Asia

It's official now, the country with the second largest population in the world has the slowest Internet speed in Asia. India has the slowest internet speed in Asia according to the ‘State of the Internet’ quarterly report released by the internet content delivery network, Akamai.

Globally, India is ranked 118 in the report and is behind Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam and Indonesia.

The report also states that the average internet connection speed in the country is just 1.7Mbps while the globally the average has reached 3.9Mbps. The average speed saw an increase of 8.4 percent quarter on quarter and 34 percent year on year.

India has an average peak connection speed of 12Mbps which is again less than Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam and Indonesia. Globally, the average peak connection speed is 21.2Mbps and as can be seen India is nowhere near it. The average peak connection speed saw an increase of 7.6 percent year on year and a decrease of 1.5 percent quarter on quarter.

The broadband adoption has been measured by Akamai by analyzing the percentage of users getting internet connection speed of 4Mbps or more. In India, the number of internet users with a speed of 4Mbps or more increased by 17 percent on quarter on quarter and 111 percent year on year.

According to Akamai, internet speeds above 10 Mbps and more should be considered as high broadband. It’s astonishing to know that in India only 0.7 percent of the internet users enjoy high broadband or have a connection speed of 10 Mbps or more. The report also reveals that in India, only 4.9 percent internet users have an access to internet connection with speeds of 4 Mbps or more. This has increased by 39 percent quarter on quarter and 106 percent year on year.

The highest average connection speed was recorded by South Korea at 23.6Mbps. It also has the highest average peak connection speed at 68.5Mbps according to the report.

The report also identifies the top countries form where the attack traffic originates and also the top ports which bear the brunt of these attacks.  Here, China took the top position by being responsible for about 41 percent of observed attack and was followed by the US which was responsible for 11 percent of the observed attack traffic.

The measurements which have been published in the ‘State of the Internet’ quarterly report are all based on the requests that were put forth to Akamai’s HTTP/S platform.

India has slowest Internet speed in Asia

It's official now, the country with the second largest population in the world has the slowest Internet speed in Asia. India has the slowest internet speed in Asia according to the ‘State of the Internet’ quarterly report released by the internet content delivery network, Akamai.

Globally, India is ranked 118 in the report and is behind Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam and Indonesia.

The report also states that the average internet connection speed in the country is just 1.7Mbps while the globally the average has reached 3.9Mbps. The average speed saw an increase of 8.4 percent quarter on quarter and 34 percent year on year.

India has an average peak connection speed of 12Mbps which is again less than Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam and Indonesia. Globally, the average peak connection speed is 21.2Mbps and as can be seen India is nowhere near it. The average peak connection speed saw an increase of 7.6 percent year on year and a decrease of 1.5 percent quarter on quarter.

The broadband adoption has been measured by Akamai by analyzing the percentage of users getting internet connection speed of 4Mbps or more. In India, the number of internet users with a speed of 4Mbps or more increased by 17 percent on quarter on quarter and 111 percent year on year.

According to Akamai, internet speeds above 10 Mbps and more should be considered as high broadband. It’s astonishing to know that in India only 0.7 percent of the internet users enjoy high broadband or have a connection speed of 10 Mbps or more. The report also reveals that in India, only 4.9 percent internet users have an access to internet connection with speeds of 4 Mbps or more. This has increased by 39 percent quarter on quarter and 106 percent year on year.

The highest average connection speed was recorded by South Korea at 23.6Mbps. It also has the highest average peak connection speed at 68.5Mbps according to the report.

The report also identifies the top countries form where the attack traffic originates and also the top ports which bear the brunt of these attacks.  Here, China took the top position by being responsible for about 41 percent of observed attack and was followed by the US which was responsible for 11 percent of the observed attack traffic.

The measurements which have been published in the ‘State of the Internet’ quarterly report are all based on the requests that were put forth to Akamai’s HTTP/S platform.