BANGALORE, INDIA: This is an attempt to look into the top five networking trends which failed to click or went slow in 2011, however, are hopeful of making a come back in 2012.

Internet Speed and Broadband

While it is only natural to expect improvement from any sort of service as years progress and technology advancements set in, seems like it is not the case with India's Internet speed.

Also Read: 100GbE interfaces to be mainstream in 2012: Report

At a time when the country is bragging about the third and even the fourth generation telecom technology, a report by Akamai states that the average Internet speed in India was just 0.8mbps in Q3 of 2010.

Not just that, this amounted to a 6.9 per cent quarterly decline and nine per cent yearly decline in the speed.

How many of us are happy to know that India is the only country to see this kind of a fall in Internet speed among the 12 Asian countries that were covered in Akamai's study?

India has a lot to feel great about its telecom industry as is the second largest growing telecom industry in the world with over 500 million active mobile subscribers.

However, when it comes to its broadband user base, it showcases a pathetic figure. Its Internet user base has crossed the 100-million mark, how so ever, the broadband user base is still staggering at a little over 12 million.

Also Read: 3G breaks India's bandwidth bottleneck

The Indian government's ambition to cater to 200 million broadband users by 2015, seems not just a distant dream, but also a farce considering the aforesaid dropping Internet speed and the fact that broadband in India means just 256 kbps and above speed, whereas for the rest (international standard) it is 1 Mbps and above.

A by-product of this low Internet and broadband penetration is that Internet protocol version six is yet to make a major churn in the industry. Despite the government's deadline, it is very unlikely that the whole of Indian online domain service providers will migrate to this version from its predecessor 1Pv4, by March 2012.

The industry is aware of its benefits and the need for this migration, however, has taken a 'wait and watch' stand because of a couple of reasons. The industry wants to see what changes will it bring in and how will it benefit them. .

Moreover, many have just decided to take out some more time off before going in for this costly migration, since not many products and devices are out which support this kind of migration and when still a majority of their traffic comes from IPv4 domains why bother now.