The number of users surfing the internet on desktops as welll as laptops may not have increased as fast as expected by the the industry, the projections are still very much positive, and the trend clearly up from a longer term perspective.
The number of Indian users plugged on to mobile internet has almost more than doubled, according to Google. The number has substantially gone up from about 8-10 million user base at the start of 2009, according to the firm. It states that the significant upsurge in traffic flow to Google Mobile happened around March-April last year. A signifcant rise was then witnessed in Google searches conducted on mobiles.
“The year 2009 was indeed big for us. We used to feel that India is low-end mobile market basically with users lacking appetite for value-based data consumption over mobile. However, we began to see a sudden spike in traffic flow in mobile Internet space towards February-March 2009. We then analysed the data only and found this is the real growth,” states product manager (Mobile) of Google India, Alok Goel.
Telecom operators are offering innovative data plans. Also, huge reduction in Internet-enabled handset prices is expected to lead to more number of net surfers using their handsets for the purpose. A major factor driving this growth is the low cost of GPRS (general packet radio service ready) mobile handsets.
According to Tata Docomo, among the new entrants in India’s cellular market, nearly 40-45 per cent of its overall subscriber base now has GPRS activated mobile connections. This sure will lead to ‘healthy data usage’. Deepak Gulati, President of Tata Docomo has been quoted as saying: “It’s still early days for us to put an annual growth figure. However, data is among the fastest growing revenue streams for us.”