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Figure 3 shows time series of the daily averaged derived TCP throughputs (in kbits/s) to S. Asia from SLAC. It can be seen that there are large fluctuations. These fluctuations are a characteristic of congested lines (typically the last mile). At weekends when people are not at work, there is less congestion and better throughput. It is also seen that the countries divide into two. India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and the Maldives have better throughput 400-1200 kbits/s compared to Nepal, Bangladesh, Bhutan and Afghanistan with between 75 and 400 kbits/s.
The minimum RTTs (seen in the Figue 4 below from CERN/Geneva Switzerland) are acceptable for India and Pakistan. For Afghanistan they are large (dreadful or over 500ms) since the connections are via geostationary satellite(s). The routing (see above) for Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Nepal and Bhutan is non-optimal so the RTTs are poor or very poor. 
Routing Within South Asian Countries
We have PingER monitoring stations in India and Pakistan. Reverse traceroute servers are deployed at PingER monitoring stations which helps us understand how India and Pakistan are connected with different countries of South Asia. India's VSNL provides Internet Service to Nepal and Bhutan, but the strange thing that we noted is that the traffic from India first goes to United Kingdom and then returns to India (passes through two hops in India Mumbai and Dehli) and then goes to Nepal. And in the case of Bhutan it first goes from India to Hong Kong, then returns to India and then eventually goes to Bhutan.
Afghanistan is served by a satellite provider from DESY, Hamburg, Germany (part of the Silk Road project), so the traffic goes to Germany via satellite and then is beamed back to Afghanistan via satellite. Between sites in Pakistan or between sites in India traffic goes relatively directy without leaving the country. Traffic from Pakistan: to India goes via the US or Canada; to Bangladesh goes via the US and the UK. Although Bangladesh now has access to SEMEW4 some of the sites in Bangladesh are still on satellite and the satellite service is provided by a number of European Countries.Traffic from India: to Pakistan goes via Europe; to Bangladesh goes via the UK.
Due to all the indirect routing the average RTT from India and Pakistan to other South Asian countries is below the acceptable mark.
