India's 5G subscriber base may exceed 1 billion by 2031, shows data

India's 5G base is set to cross 1 billion by 2031, driven by surging data usage from AI, cloud gaming, and video streaming

Nokia Mobile Broadband Index report projects India’s 5G subscriber base to exceed 1 billion by 2031. The report shows India’s 5G traffic grew 70 per cent on-year to reach 12.9 exabytes (EB) in 2025 contributing to nearly 47 per cent of overall mobile broadband traffic.  Average monthly mobile data consumption per user is over 31 GB in 2025, up 18 per cent Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) over five years, due to AI usage, cloud gaming and 4K video streaming. India had 892 million active 4G devices of which 383 million were already on 5G.