Indian smartphone users to double by 2022 to 829 mn on low prices: Cisco

India's base of smartphone users is expected to double to 829 million by 2022, driven by the falling cost of smartphones as well as mobile data, according to estimates from networking giant Cisco.   

Since the launch of Reliance Jio in September 2016, which forced the entire telecom industry to lower prices of data, internet consumption has shot up multi-fold. From 108 petabytes of data consumed per day in 2017, the traffic may hit 646 petabytes per day in 2022, as per Cisco's Virtual Networking Index, an annual global forecast report.

The report suggested that the average data consumed on a smartphone in India by 2022 will be 17.5 GB, up from 3.5 GB consumed per smartphone per month in 2017.  

With this, it is expected that by 2022 about 60 per cent of the population in India, or 840 million people, will come onto the internet, either on smartphones or desktops. In 2017, only 27 per cent of the population, or 357 million, surfed the internet at least once a month. 

"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," said Sanjay Kaul, president (Asia-Pacific and Japan), Service Provider Business, at Cisco.

The growth in data consumption is complemented by the growing number of connected devices, which are expected to go up to 2.2 billion by 2022 from 1.6 billion in 2017, of which smartphones are likely to account for 38 per cent, growing at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 15.5 per cent.