Broadband Internet at 1Gbps to make an appearance by mid-2013

By the middle of next year, you may be able to download a two-hour movie in 30 seconds. Telecom Infrastructure firm, Radius Infratel has revealed that residential broadband consumers may see downloads get speedier with ultra-fast download speeds reaching 1Gbps by mid-2013. The company has projected that these new changes may take effect across nine Indian cities. “In the next six--nine months, world class 1,000 Mbps or 1Gbps (Gigabits per second) plans will be available in India to residential consumers. On connections like these, the same two hour HD movie will download in 30 seconds...A two-hour movie in high definition version will be about 2.2GB size,” reports quoted Radius Infratel CEO Rajnish Wahi as saying. 

Speedier Internet by mid-2013 (Image credit: Getty Images)

Although Wahi did not share the names of service providers or the cities where the new plan may take effect, he said that discussions are underway and network deployment is complete to enable this in Gurgaon.

Wahi added that Radius has partnered with real estate developers including DLF, Unitech, Emaar MGF, Ansal, Mantri, Vipul, ATS, Omaxe, Vipul, M3M, Paramount and Prateek for fibre optic network, which will provide high-speed broadband services in projects being developed by Radius Infratel.

"Radius network is already available in or near 3 lakh homes and is live in Delhi, Gurgaon, Noida, Greater Noida, Indirapuram (Ghaziabad). The network will soon be available in Bengaluru, Chennai, Pune, Mumbai and Chandigarh," Executive Director of Radius Infratel, Kuldeep Goyal said.

One of the popular players in this space is the state-owned Mahanagar Telephone Nigam Limited (MTNL). The telecom operator offers a host of 'fiber to the home' (FTTH) plans. Under its Fibre Thrill 2590 plan, MTNL is offering 20Mbps download speeds at a monthly charge of Rs 2,590, and free monthly usage of 150GB of data. One of the other players in this space is Airtel. It recently unveiled its FTTH tariffs for Delhi-NCR. The Fibrenet 175GB plan offers 100Mbps speed for a data transfer limit of up to 175GB, and 512Kbps thereafter, for Rs 5,299. 

1Gbps Internet services were recently launched in Kansas City, US, by Google as a part of its Google Fiber services. 

On a related note, at one of its housing projects in Kharghar, Navi Mumbai, the City and Industrial Development Corporation of Maharashtra Ltd (CIDCO) has been planning something revolutionary. In a nutshell, CIDCO aims to change the way wires are typically installed in homes, and to this end it plans to implement its infrastructural technology called FTTH, reports Mid Day.

With the FTTH technology, which is in its final stages, electricity, Internet, CCTV, telephone, and TV cable connections will be smoothly converged onto a single hub, and then moved to a terminal in the flat, thereby simplifying manageability and of course, reducing clutter.   

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