India now has no dial up connections, confirms TRAI

BSNL confirms to TRAI, India now has no dial up connections

As the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) moves to repeal a decades-old regulation that dictated the technology's quality of service, the last dial-up connection, reported by BSNL, was switched off in India in March 2021.

TRAI released draft regulations inviting comments from stakeholders on the repeal of Regulation on Quality of Service of Dial-Up and Leased Line Internet Access Service, 2001.

“These regulations were issued when the dial-up service was the only service available for accessing low-speed internet,” TRAI said in a draft released on April 3, referring to the 2001 regulation.

“With the passage of [...] time, the telecommunication networks both wireline as well as wireless have evolved to offer high-speed broadband service on xDSL, FTTH, LTE, etc.,” the regulator said in an explanatory note, referring to technologies used by telecom and broadband providers to deliver their services.

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“Only BSNL was reporting the dial-up subscribers until March 2021 and afterwards BSNL was also not reporting any dial-up subscribers,” TRAI said in its note, adding that BSNL had sent the regulator a certificate confirming that it no longer had any dial-up users in India.

Historically, dial-up internet speeds reached a maximum of 56 kilobits per second. It is over 1,800 times faster than a 100 Mbps fibre-to-the-home connection commonly available in Indian cities.

Additionally, TRAI seeks to repeal regulations that set quality benchmarks for leased-line internet, service businesses and other organizations subscribe to. As TRAI argued in a press release accompanying the draft repeal, service-level agreements (SLAs) privately signed between organisations and internet providers were sufficient to protect the former.