India's broadband growth ‘third fastest' in the world

Broadband growth rate in India, though sluggish compared to the uptake in mobile usage, is already the third fastest in the world.

According to the Broadband Forum, only China and the United States had a faster growth in broadband subscribers than India in 2010.

India added more than 2.5 million new connections of broadband last year and now stands at number 13 in the world in terms of overall subscriber numbers.

Speaking at the Convergence India 2011 Expo, Mr Robin Mersh, CEO Broadband Forum said, “There has been tremendous and consistent growth in the broadband across India in recent years, yet this is just the tip of the iceberg.” India was barely in the top 50 of broadband countries just six years ago.

“Both fixed and wireless broadband options abound, and the Broadband Forum is doing all it can to help India's providers engineer smarter and faster networks,” he added.

Globally, 2010 was a landmark year for broadband subscriptions — following the milestone of half billion lines achieved in July 2010.

Subscriber figures continued to climb steadily and ended the year at 523,066,022 – a net addition of over 55 million lines during the year.

India has a total of 12 million fixed line broadband subscribers and another 2-3 million on the wireless platform.

But these numbers are very small compared with the huge growth in the mobile sector. While there are nearly 14-15 million new mobile subscribers every month, only a few lakh new broadband connections are being added each month. The Government had set a target of reaching 20 million broadband subscribers by the end of 2010 but fell short by 50 per cent.

However, this is expected to change with operators rolling out 3G and broadband networks over the next two years. The Government is also planning to roll out a nationwide optic fibre backbone network at a cost of nearly Rs 30,000 crore in order to ramp up the infrastructure.

Going by the current growth rate, India will be among the top ten countries in terms of total broadband subscribers by the end of 2011.

Mr Mersh said that India's telecommunications operators, vendors and research establishments should become involved with developing standards that will help enable the widespread adoption of broadband.

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