Undoubtedly, India is one of the fastest growing country in terms of mobile Internet usages. I have already mentioned that half of the internet access in India is coming from mobile devices, but is it true that the mobile internet usage has outclassed fixed-line web? Yes, it’s true, mobile internet usages tied up internet usages in July of this year, but till the end of August, the margin increased to little bit high. As per the stats provided by Internet measurement firm–StatCounter–, desktop devices recorded 48.91% of web usages on September 2012, while mobile devices reached to 51.09% web usages on the same day. See the graph for more detail month-wise analysis for fixed internet usages and mobile Internet usages.
It’s clear from the above stats that desktop internet usages follows a steady surge in the share of mobile internet usages. Mobile internet usages mounted up from 34.13% in September 2011 to 54.98% till the beginning of this month, while during this period desktop internet usages declined by 20.85%. China is one of the first countries where desktop web usages crossover fixed-internet users and why not, here smartphone shipments has just overlooked featured phones. It’s clear that increasing number of smartphone and Tablet has enhanced internet usages and users are more interested in video and audio streaming on their mobile device.
Yesterday, I showed off how mobile internet usages is increasing in rural India. In rural sector, mobile users access internet for two purposes; first, entertainment and second, education. Internet access through the pocket device has entirely revolutionized the country. However, the lack of widespread internet across the country has compelled users to keep themselves away from the internet or do work offline.
As I earlier discussed, in India, internet access on the PC device is too expensive and there’s need of reliable infrastructure. Definitely, for accessing internet one needs to have desktop, which is quite expensive than low-end web-enabled devices. And also, too expensive broadband services (are being provided by vendors across the country) forces them to not use internet. However, 3G tariff is also costlier here and majority of users are still stuck with the 2G services.
Ironically, India has over 1.2 billion population, but internet penetration is still below 10%. In India, mobile devices (smartphone and feature phone) have now become a primary source of internet access.
