Throttlers. Net bottlers.

30 years after the launch of Internet connectivity, India has managed only basic levels of access speeds and reliability. Technology, meanwhile, is galloping away

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"To be of good quality, you have to excuse yourself from the presence of shallow and callow-minded individuals." — Michael Bassey Johnson

Three things hit me right between the eyes last week. One, Japanese technologists sporting white lab coats in dust-free test conditions managed to achieve data speeds of 1 million Gbps, crowning a year of efforts and tech-tweaking. Two, my own service provider in India's Capital city of Delhi surreptitiously downgraded my data connectivity speeds from the contracted 1 Gbps to 25 Mbps for a week before I unearthed his craftiness and hollered blue murder at him. Three (stems from "Two"), the latest Tom Cruise movie I was watching kept buffering, with a white circle going round-round on my TV screen, driving me nuts and making me hate the gracefully-ageing Cruise and his femme fatales.

Movies, murder and dangling nuts aside, it was a most degenerative experience and led to a dispiriting realization... That while some nations like Japan are sending data at over a million gigabits per second in research labs, India — the globe's fourth-largest economy — languishes with a sluggish broadband, intermittent mobile data and poor reliability. I am not writing a story on the lack of Indian ambition or our technological constraints. I am talking of deliberate speed-throttling, corporate one-upmanship and a failure to treat Net access as a public utility even in the digital-first century.

India's average fixed broadband speed is 65 Mbps, while the global standard is 113 Mbps, according to Ookla's latest 'Speedtest Global Index'. Households in Singapore, Iceland, Chile and the UAE consistently clock speeds of above 250 Mbps. India's is indeed a paradoxical situation — a nation of successful moon missions and 5G launches continues to face slow or dropped connections, buffering videos and slow downloads.

Throttling, Strategic Tiering