If there's one speedway where traffic's zipping, it's on the Indian information highway. For one, India has seen a 23% growth in new internet connections for the quarter ended October. But, what is more heartening is the fact that increasingly more consumers are now using high speed connections to plug into the global network, instead of the painfully slow, and somewhat anachronistic, dial-up system.
This last bit of news will surely gladden the hearts of content suppliers, gaming companies and, of course, those who are jostling for a piece of the lucrative ecommerce cake.
Internet connectivity has been growing apace in India for some time now. In the quarter ended October, the trend continued with research agencies observing 2.6 million new IP addresses connecting to the global network, compared to 2.1 million in the quarter ended June. This is a growth of 23%. IP address, or internet protocol address, is the unique number given to each computer when it plugs into the global internet family.
According to some estimates, India has more than 41 million internet users, making it the eighth largest internet population in the world. What's encouraging is that this number is growing every quarter. With only 4% of the country's population plugged into the net family, the headroom for growth is also enormous. But the one indicator that's blowing every one's minds is the gradual migration to high speed connectivity from the earlier dial-up situation. Currently, 74% of all internet connections in India have speeds of over 256 kbps. In fact, the number of connections with speeds of 2mbps and above is also growing fast-- from 4.6% of all connections in the second quarter to 5% in the third quarter.
China, incidentally, has only 4.3% of all connections with speeds above 2mbps. This, when combined with the growing internet penetration, is a significant indicator since it shows how high speed networks have become affordable over the
India ranks a lowly 153 in IP addresses
The growing number of consumers using highspeed internet connection also shows how eager the Indian internet audience is to engage in e-commerce and all the other amenities that high-speed connections offer.
The high-speed connections have also been made possible by the increasingly complex, and growing, grid of submarine, fibre-optic networks that now connect India with the rest of the world. For example, a consortium of 16 telecom companies is planning to build a 15,000-km submarine cable system that will link India with Europe through the Middle East. The project is expected to cost upwards of $700 million and add 3.84 tbps of capacity. Interestingly, stateowned Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd has plans to offer high speed internet access to 25,000 villages by the end of March 2009.
According to Sanjay Singh, managing director at Akamai Technologies, which provides a quarterly state-of-the-internet report: “In Q3, we saw a 23% growth in terms of new IPs from India. This increase may be attributed to more people turning to the world wide web for news and video content related to the Beijing Olympic Games, which took place in August. We also noted a gradual improvement in terms of IP per capita which increased to 2.3 unique IPs per 1,000 people, and believe India is poised for significant growth in internet adoption.’’
However, India ranks a low 153 in terms of number of IP addresses per capita, with 2.3 unique IPs per thousand people. In comparison, China had 30 unique IPs per thousand people and United States had 360 unique IPs per thousand people, while being ranked at No 94 and No 6 respectively
Verisign—which manages .com, .net and .tv domain names—has also come out with a domain name report that mentions a 26% increase in domain registrations in Q1 2008 over the same quarter of 2007. Domain registrations have grown by 46% in Q1 of 2008. “At the end of Q1 2008, there were 1.2 million domain name registrations in India,’’ said Verisign’s Shantha K. “This represents a 46% growth over the previous year and a 12% growth over the previous quarter. Of these registrations, approximately 6.85 lakh are .com and .net domain name registrations and 4.10 are .in domain name registrations,’’ he added.
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