In the 8th edition of the Mobile Broadband India Traffic Index (MBIT) 2021, recently Nokia released the description related to the mobile broadband performance in the country. As per the report, it is highlighted that year over year the data traffic has heightened by 36% in 2020. Addition of millions of new 4G subscribers around the country and primarily owing the 4G data consumption is key factor in the growth. In India, data traffic has been rose by 60 times in last five years which is considered as the highest among the world. Additionally, the 4G alone comprised of 99% of the total data traffic in 2020.
According to company report, in December last year, the average monthly data consumption per user increased to 13.5GB. This indicates that because of rise in data subscribers, along with a lot of online video consumption, the annual growth of 20% of the data consumption was observed. Amongst the fastest-growing category, the short video format was considered in the previous year. Excepted growth of the short video will be four times by the year 2025. It was observed that there was an increase in data consumption in the country from rural areas also. For both the purposes, productivity and entertainment, an average Indian approximately spent daily 5 hours on their smartphones.
While looking at the number of 4G devices in the country, the figure surpassed 607 million units achieving a penetration level of 77% in the market. 93% of all the LTE devices are constituted by VOLTE devices in the market. The growth of smartphone industry is expected to be in double digit in 2021 due to large number of users, who will look forward to supporting the e-learning model and watch over-the-top (OTT) content. In the Indian market already 2 million of 5G devices are present in the market. And launching 5G services in India is still a little far. The telecom and mobile industries in India are expected to drive the growth due to launch of low-cost 4G smartphones.
