Given the state of the fixed landline in the country and the prices of the PCs, less than 10% of the population has access to Internet. For India to widely embrace Internet, mobiles are the only way out.
Thanks to the incredible growth India has registered in mobile telephony, the country is expected to lead in the use of mobile digital services as well.
A recent report by IAMAI gives an idea on where the Mobile Internet (MI) stands at the moment in the country. First, the bad news. India has not yet reached the tipping point for MI, the point at which it becomes the dominant mode of online access and grows further rapidly. The good news, the tipping point is pretty close. It takes just a few strides from here to get there.
India has 78.7 million mobile users, who access Internet at least once a month through their handy devices. While this compares very well with the country's 100 million odd fixed landline Internet users, the mobile group also includes laptops with dongles, tablets, and dongles that connect to Internet. There is no separate data on the number of people using Internet through their phones. But the report says there are 2.7 million dongles in use. So, you may deduce that most of the MI users are doing it over their phones.
Email, social networking sites and chat are the most popular applications; 83%, 77% and 65% of the MI users respectively say they use their devices to access these services.
Other reasons for using MI in declining order of popularity: online games (47 % of users), portal web sites (44%), search (40%), online video (29%), online news (28%), apps (25%), cricket web sites (24%), ticketing (17%) and e-banking (16%).
The use of apps is a sign of sophistication; while only a quarter of total users engage in them, their number is higher than those accessing cricket web sites. Nearly a third of the total users access online videos, again a good sign, as it indicates the quality of bandwidth and the willingness to pay for it. E-commerce services are at the bottom of the ladder, but their users are in double digits.
Very interestingly, it is the moderate spenders, who dominate MI usage. Eighty per cent of the users pay a monthly bill of between Rs 101 and Rs 1,000. Fifty-eight per cent of them between Rs 101 to Rs 500. The average monthly bill of a MI user is Rs 460.
Forty-five per cent of it is spent on Internet access. Key point: MI is neither a fringe nor an elitist activity. It is the lower part of the pyramid, which is driving it.
Fifty per cent of the users have sub-Rs 10,000 handsets. Thirty-two per cent of them use devices costing between Rs 6,501 and 10,000. Nearly a fifth of the total users have handsets costing between Rs 3,501 and Rs 6,500. As the devices at the lower price points become more efficient in supporting online activities, their numbers would grow further. The tipping point is indeed in sight.