India’s internet user base is expected to grow over 100% by 2021 to touch the lives of 59% of the country’s population, global networking giant Cisco said.
According to Cisco’s Visual Networking Index (VNI) complete forecast, in the next four years 829 million Indians will have access to the internet, compared to 373 million users in 2016. It also said that the number of networked devices will go up from 1.4 billion in 2016 to two billion.
“Mobile networks, devices and connections in India are not only getting smarter in their computing capabilities, but are also evolving from lower-generation network connectivity (2G) to higher-generation network connectivity (3G, 3.5G, and 4G or LTE),” said Sanjay Kaul, managing director, service provider business, Cisco India & SAARC.
The overall IP traffic is also expected to grow four-fold between 2016 and 2021 with a compounded annual growth rate of 30% to reach 6.5 exabytes of data per month – up from 1.7 exabytes recorded last year.
M2M connections will represent 22% of the total two billion devices and connections, and will account for 5% of IP traffic by 2021. According to the report, advancements in IoT applications, such as smart meters, package tracking, digital health monitors and a host of other next-generation M2M services, is driving this incremental growth, which translates into nearly 21% increase in the next five years.
Video will continue to dominate IP traffic and the overall Internet traffic growth, representing 76% of all internet traffic, which was at 57% in 2016. “India will reach 84 billion internet video minutes per month by 2021, or about thirty two thousand video minutes every second,” the report added.
Mobile data traffic will grow seven-fold with a compound annual growth rate of 49% during the period. “Combining device capabilities with faster, higher bandwidth and more intelligent networks is leading to wide adoption of high-bandwidth data, video and advanced multimedia applications that contribute to increased mobile and Wi-Fi traffic,” added Kaul.
