Unlike most of the developed countries, India has skipped the Desktop generation and have directly moved to mobile/smartphone generation. And, this clearly evident based on the number of mobiles that have been sold in last decade. And now, Indians are moving from feature phones to Smartphones at even faster pace.
According to a recent report, by 2016 India will have over 200 million smartphones surpassing US to become second largest smartphone market in the world. This number will reach 651 million by 2019 according to Cisco’s ‘VNI Global Data Traffic Forecast’ report.
The growth in smartphones is going to lead to significant rise in mobile data usage and will grow 13-fold in next 5 years.
Mobile traffic will also grow thrice as fast as fixed IP traffic between 2014 to 2019. Mobile Data traffic will account for 28 percent of total internet traffic by 2019, up from 9 percent in 2014.
Highlights from the Cisco report
- Half of all the mobile connections will be “Smart” in five years from now
- Data Traffic from Smartphones will grow 20.8-fold from 2014 to 2019
- Data Traffic from Tablets will grow a whopping 75.4-fold from 2014 to 2019
- Smartphones will account for 76 percent of total mobile data traffic by 2019 up from 43% in 2014
- Average 3G speed will grow 2.4-fold to 3,394 kbps by 2019
- 4G will account for 38.2 percent of total mobile data traffic by 2019. Currently it accounts for only 3.1 percent
- By 2019, the average 4G speed will be 8,978 kbps, up from 5,575 kbps in 2014
- Tablets will witness 9.2-fold growth to reach 18.7 million units by 2019
- Wearable devices will reach 5.9 million in number by 2019, up from 1.4 million in 2014
- Traffic from wearable devices will grow 16-fold from 2014 to 2019
The report states that Indian will have 895.6 million mobile users by 2019, up from 590.3 million in 2014. However, according to recent TRAI telecom subscription report, India currently has over 824.4 million mobile subscribers. Even if you calculate around 20 percent users using more than one connection, that number does not add up.
While the mobile subscriber numbers may be off a bit, we think the report gives a clear indication that internet consumption through mobile and tablet devices is going to go through the roof in coming years!
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