India To Become World’s Second Largest Internet Population By Mid 2014

Internet penetration in India has been zooming, especially in the rural sector, where people are accessing the World Wide Web on their smartphones and smart devices. In a report submitted by IAMAI, the numbers show that in October 2013, India had over 205 million Internet users. This is a year-on-year growth of 40% over 2012. The numbers are slated to grow further to 213 million by December 2013.

By June 2014, the Indian Internet population will cross 243 million users and will displace USA to number 3. Only china will be ahead of India who currently hold over 300 million Internet users, while USA currently has over 207 million as their Internet population.

The urban Internet population in India in October was at 137 million users, while the ones in the rural area are at 68 million. The numbers are set to grow rapidly as more and more smart devices are sold all across the nation. 3G penetrations has also grown over the last 2 years in India, which again is enabling users to access the web using 3G data cards and also 3G SIM cards.

50% of the urban Internet population accesses the Internet on a daily basis. And the report states that the frequent users are not limited just to the youth or men of the country, lot of non-working women and elderly men are also browsing the net on a daily basis. In rural India 70% of the active Internet users also access the web using a mobile phone, while 32% only use the mobile phone to go on the web. Cyber café’s is where 40% of rural users go to access the web.

This is good news for the telecom industry and allied sector. As the numbers seem to be growing quickly, it will turn into larger revenues for the service and equipment providers. Now, only if 3G was perfect in the country, we would have had faster Internet adoption rate.