India’s mobile data consumption grows four times in past 5 years

Vijay C Roy

Chandigarh, July 5

Mobile data consumption per individual in the country has grown four times in the past five years, and has been surging further. From 5 GB per individual per month, five years ago, it is now over 20 GB per individual.

The consumption is largely driven by factors such as proliferation of content, network expansion, affordability of data plan and availability of a wide range of affordable devices. Currently, India has more than 830 million active internet users, with over half of them from rural areas.

“Internet consumption is at an all-time high as against a 5 GB data being consumed five years ago per individual per month, an average mobile user now consumes as much as 20 GB of internet every month,” said Abhijit Kishore, COO, Vodafone Idea in an interaction with The Tribune here. He said the internet was full of contents, including regional, which led to increase in consumption.

Amit Marwah, Nokia India head of marketing and corporate affairs, said: “The data consumption in India has increased 20 per cent year-on-year to 17.4 exabytes per month. It is one of the highest data consumption in the world. On average, an individual subscriber is consuming 24 GB of data per month. This shows the appetite for data consumption in India is too high.”

As per industry sources, other factors included the growth of OTT platforms which was aided by the availability of affordable data. Growth of online gaming and live streaming of big events like cricket World Cup, football World Cup and events like Oscars have also boosted data consumption.

The industry insiders said data tariffs in India were the lowest in the world and introduction of per day pre-paid plans has acted as game changer to boost the consumption as one can buy one GB data for just Rs 22.

Additionally, network expansion and performance, coupled with the availability of a wide range of affordable devices, as well as the introduction of new data-intensive apps and services, and accelerated the data consumption.

The insiders mentioned that a smartphone used to cost Rs 20,000 five years ago. Now, one can have much better smartphone anywhere between Rs 3,000 and Rs 4,000.

For example, there has been a 2.4x increase in annual data traffic on Reliance Jio over the past three years and per capita monthly data usage has increased to 28.7 GB vs 13.3 GB three years ago, as per a report on Reliance Jio’s last Quarter Financial Results for 2023-24.