Nokia recently released its 8th edition of the Mobile Broadband India Traffic Index (MBiT) 2021 detailing the mobile broadband performance in the country. The report highlights that data traffic grew by 36% YoY in 2020 primarily owing to the 4G data consumption and the addition of millions of new 4G subscribers across the country. In the last five years, data traffic in India grew by 60 times which is amongst the highest worldwide. Adding to this, in 2020, 99% of the total data traffic constituted of 4G alone — more details on the story ahead.
Average Monthly Data Consumption Per User Increased to 13.5GB
According to the report, the average monthly data consumption per user rose to 13.5GB in December 2020. It denotes an annual growth of 20% owing a lot to the online video consumption and increase in data subscribers. The short video format was amongst the fastest-growing category last year. By 2025, the short video content is expected to grow by four times. There was also a rise in data consumption from rural areas of the country. An average Indian spent approximately 5 hours in his/her smartphone daily for both entertainment and productivity purposes. Talking about the number of 4G devices in the country, the figure surpassed 607 million units achieving a penetration level of 77% in the market. VoLTE devices constituted 93% of all the LTE devices in the market. As for the 5G devices, there are already 2 million of those in the Indian market. In 2021, double-digit growth for the smartphone industry is expected given that more number of users will seek to embrace e-learning models and consume over-the-top (OTT) content. The launch of low-cost 4G smartphones is further expected to drive the growth of the telecom and mobile industry in India. India is still a little far from launching 5G services, but the number of 5G devices are also expected to grow substantially this year.
