research-article

Revisiting the State of Cellular Data Connectivity in India

Authors:

Asheesh Sharma,

Aravindh Raman,

Aaditeshwar SethAuthors Info & Claims

DEV '15: Proceedings of the 2015 Annual Symposium on Computing for Development

Pages 149 - 157

https://doi.org/10.1145/2830629.2830649

Published: 01 December 2015 Publication History

Abstract

The count of mobile Internet users in India has been growing at a rate of 27% annually and is expected to reach 300M by 2017. There is however limited understanding of whether this rapid growth is happening while also ensuring that good quality of service is provided to users. To find out, we deployed a measurement framework in 20 rural, semi-urban, and urban sites in North India and probed four leading 2G and 3G telecom providers to measure performance metrics such as availability, throughput and latency. We also observed some design and configuration aspects of cellular networks that affect the quality of service perceived by users. Our results point to many instances where misconfigurations or inadequate provisioning or poor monitoring of cellular networks led to significantly low performance provided to users. We are now using these results to argue for more robust QoS regulation in the country, and show how the current regulations for 2G and 3G services are not sufficient to hold providers accountable for the quality of service provided by them.

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Index Terms

Revisiting the State of Cellular Data Connectivity in India
1. Networks
  1. Network services

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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

DEV '15: Proceedings of the 2015 Annual Symposium on Computing for Development

December 2015

186 pages

ISBN:9781450334907

DOI:10.1145/2830629

General Chairs:
Arjuna Sathiaseelan
University of Cambridge
,
Marco Zennaro
International Centre for Theoretical Physics
,
Program Chairs:
Elizabeth Belding
University of California, Santa Barbara
,
Jay Chen
NYU Abu Dhabi

Copyright © 2015 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 01 December 2015

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Cellular data networks

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ACM DEV '15

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ACM DEV '15: Annual Symposium on Computing for Development

December 1 - 2, 2015

London, United Kingdom

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DEV '15 Paper Acceptance Rate 13 of 50 submissions, 26%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 52 of 164 submissions, 32%

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https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3460112.3472311
Johnson MLiang JLin MSinganamalla SHeimerl K(2021)Whale Watching in Inland Indonesia: Analyzing a Small, Remote, Internet-Based Community Cellular NetworkProceedings of the Web Conference 202110.1145/3442381.3449996(1483-1494)Online publication date: 19-Apr-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3442381.3449996
Ismail AKumar NBrewster SFitzpatrick GCox AKostakos V(2019)Empowerment on the MarginsProceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3290605.3300329(1-15)Online publication date: 2-May-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3290605.3300329
Ahmad TZaki YPötsh TChen JSathiaseelan ASubramanian LChandwani RSingh PKumar NVeeraraghavan R(2019)GAIUSProceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development10.1145/3287098.3287130(1-5)Online publication date: 4-Jan-2019
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Tripathi KRobertson SCooper C(2019)A brief report on older people’s experience of cybercrime victimization in Mumbai, IndiaJournal of Elder Abuse & Neglect10.1080/08946566.2019.167423131:4-5(437-447)Online publication date: 7-Oct-2019
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Sen RAhmad SPhokeer AFarooq ZQazi IChoffnes DGummadi K(2017)Inside the Walled GardenACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review10.1145/3155055.315505847:5(12-24)Online publication date: 25-Oct-2017
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Singh SNanda VSen RSengupta SKumaraguru PGummadi KSaif U(2017)Leveraging Facebook's Free Basics Engine for Web Service Deployment in Developing RegionsProceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development10.1145/3136560.3136568(1-11)Online publication date: 16-Nov-2017
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Ahmad SHaamid AQazi ZZhou ZBenson TQazi IGill PHeidemann JByers JGovindan R(2016)A View from the Other SideProceedings of the 2016 Internet Measurement Conference10.1145/2987443.2987470(319-325)Online publication date: 14-Nov-2016
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