You might have heard this already. Airtel Broadband is the official broadband sponsor of the YouTube streaming of the Indian Premier League matches.

The company is offering free 2mbps streaming for all their customers on the IPL channel on YouTube.

In simple terms… No matter what package you are on, you would get 2mbps on the YouTube IPL channel.

This is great news for users like me who are on less than 2 mbps connections on Airtel Broadband.

The sad part however is that the bandwidth usage would still be counted and this makes it pretty much useless for customers on limited data transfer packages.

Anyways…

A former member of the India Broadband Forum has raised an interesting question.

Airtel Broadband might be going against the network neutrality principles by offering this free service.

Network neutrality in simple terms require the internet service provider to provide equal quality of service on all the web based platforms.

Airtel is offering extra speed on one particular service on the web… That is not locally hosted on their server (intranet). So, essentially it is against network neutrality.

This is not a problem for now considering it is being offered for free and is beneficial for most Airtel customers.

The question here is this. Airtel has shown that they have the technology to control bandwidth supply on individual websites.

This makes it possible for them to limit speeds on services like YouTube in the future. They might already be doing that for what we know.

What may seems like a cool service from Airtel might become a painful experience for all of us later on. There is no law in our land that would stop them from charging extra to experience the smoothness of web based videos on services like YouTube.

Only time will tell, if that is going to happen.