RuralNet: Understanding the state of internet connectivity in rural India

Connecting the the rural regions of the world to the Internet has been a topic of significant research, where focus has been on building access technologies. At the same time, there has been an exponential increase in mobile penetration in developing countries like India. In addition to 2G data technologies like GPRS and 1xRTT, cellular service providers have begun deploying higher data rate technologies like HSPA and 1xEV-DO in smaller towns. The effort to build access technologies for rural regions has been under the assumption that the rural regions are largely disconnected from the Internet. However, little work has been done to study the state of Internet connectivity in rural regions, particularly the cellular data technologies that have seen dramatic increase in penetration and usage. In this work we attempt to understand the availability and performance of cellular Internet connectivity in rural India.