India is growing rapidly as far as internet is concerned. While it might not have the fastest speed in the world being the second largest population in the world means it has a scope that is unchallenged by anyone except China.
According to Cisco, India has the fastest growth in internet traffic in the world and it is expected that Indian will have over 348 million users by as near as 2017. Imagine, just in 4 years almost a fifth of our population will be using internet. Compare this with the fact that almost a third of our people are below poverty line.
According to Cisco’s Visual Networking Index (VNI) forecast for 2012-2017, the internet traffic in India will be about 2.5 Exabytes per month in 2017. To put in perspective, 1 exabyte is roughly 1 billion gigabyte and currently this figure is 393 petabytes (1 Petabyte equals 1 million gigabytes). This is a jump of 6.4 times in four years with a compound annual growth rate of 45%.
Indian Internet Traffic Growth [Key Highlights]
- Peak Internet traffic in India will grow 8.5 times by 2017, with a CAGR of 53%.
- India’s Internet traffic will be 83 Petabytes per day in 2017, up from 10 Petabytes per day in 2012.
- India’s Internet traffic in 2017 will be equivalent to 8 billion DVDs per year, 629 million DVDs per month, or 861,446 DVDs per hour.
- Internet traffic in India will reach to 2 GB per capita in 2017
- Average Internet traffic in India will reach 8 Tbps in 2017, equivalent to 6,380,000 people streaming Internet HD video simultaneously.
At a global level currently there are 2.3 Billion on Internet and projected to a figure of 3.6 billion by 2017. This means that by 2017 more than 45% of people in the world will have the internet connection at their disposal.
If we go into a bit detail, VNI says that IP (Internet Protocol) traffic will grow from 454 petabytes currently to 2.8 exabytes in 2017 with a compound growth of 44%.
Internet video users will skyrocket to 113 million (non-mobile) from 16 million right now. This is almost 10 times in number. This obviously gives an indication of an increase in speed and quality of internet over the years.
An interesting observation also came into light that while non-PC (mobiles, tablets etc.) account for 10% of IP traffic it is set to change with their share increasing to over 50% by 2017.
It is just a proof that the growth of 3G and in future 4G will be skewed towards the mobile arena. Out of this 50%, 40% will be form Smartphones and tablets (currently having 2%) and rest by TVs and Machine-to-machine modules. Indian Mobile data traffic will grow 60-fold from 2012 to 2017, with a CAGR of 127%.
By 2017, the networked (connected) devices in India will be 2 billion. Currently this number stands at 1 billion.
All these figures are considering the current growth and predicting the future growth on it. With companies like Google focusing on Internet growth and speeds and the attitude of the government improving towards spreading of technology, the actual figures might be even surpass that.
There is one more issue and that is the fact that as more people get connected the number of people left (who are capable of spending money on something like this) reduce and while this growth might exist for this decade, a similar trend can’t be expected beyond 2020.
