Smartphone users in India to double to 829 mn by 2022: Report

Smartphone users in the country is expected to more than double in next five years to 829 million, while the percentage of population using the Internet will grow to 60 per cent, a report said Monday.

The total number of smartphone users stood at 404 million in 2017, while 27 per cent of the population used the Internet last year, technology major Cisco's Visual Networking Index (VNI) said.

The report further said that the data being carried by Internet networks will grow multiple times to 646 petabytes per day in 2022, up from the 108 petabytes per day in 2017.

Video traffic grew 73 per cent in 2017 and will reach 13.5 exabytes per month by 2022, up from 1.5 exabytes per month in 2017, it said, adding this will account for 77 per cent of all Internet traffic by 2022, up from 58 per cent in 2017.

The total number of connected devices will grow to 2.2 billion by 2022, from the 1.6 billion in 2017, the report said, adding five years from now, smartphones will constitute only 38 per cent of the connected devices.

Jump in the number of connected devices will lead to a jump in India's per capita traffic consumption to nearly 14 gigabytes by 2022, from 2.4 gigabytes in 2017, it said.

The total number of wi-fi hotspots, including those at homes, will grow to 60 lakh by 2022, from 51,500 in 2017, the report said.

"By 2022, the smartphone data consumption will increase by 5x in India which proves the dominance of smartphones as the communications hub for social media, video consumption, communications, and business applications, as well as traditional voice," Cisco's president for the service provider business in Asia Pacific, Sanjay Kaul, said.

He said it is also imperative for the service providers to modernise the networks in this journey.

In other data sets, the report said the average fixed broadband speed grew 44 per cent in a year in 2017 to 9.5 Mbps.