The Canvas

Although its been only 2 years or lesser since DSL actually got ON in Pakistan, but the prices have relatively stagnated with respect to it’s wireless cousins, the mobile and cellular networks.

While trunk calls on land lines and internetwork cellular rates have plummeted, DSL users remain to the see the day when they could get pure broadband at their homes.

The current running rates in Pakistan are around Rs. 900 to Rs. 1100 per month per connection limited to approximately 1.5 GB of maximum upload/download in a month for DSL. The rates may slightly vary on networks, but this gives you a picture of how they compare to the voice lines on cell nets that have around Rs. 2 or lesser per minute for a call to anywhere in the world.

Voice needs a synchronous connection, meaning the data rates need to be matched at both ends, there should be minimal to no delay in the line to avoid jitter, and of course there is a lot of bandwidth ‘dedication’ in a single connection. Where for a data connection in a DSL, routers help packet synchronization and delivery where there is no worry for jitter, quality of connection, and the bandwidth available.

Even then, the prices and tariffs for DSL/broadband connections are much, much higher than those on other mediums.

The end user, people like me, who are addicted to downloading 10s of GBs per month over unlimited usage connections, this 1.5 GB cap is a huge bottleneck. There is a lot of complain from homeusers that even 1 GB is not good enough for proper browsing. Let alone the proper broadband experience.

A broadband experience is where the user experiences almost no delay in loading pages from anywhere on the internet, downloads complete at a highspeed, sharing stuff through torrents and download through torrents is viable, video sharing websites like YouTube, Dailymotion have high loading rates, etc. Gaming over the internet is a completely different story.

But all this is still fantasy for a person or a user who is only asking for cheaper rates and or an increase in this nonsensical download/upload limit on DSL connections which render these connection as just highspeed connections, and nothing else. I fail to recognize them as broadband connections.