Smartphone users in India expected to double by 2022: Cisco report

The number of smartphone users in India is expected to double to 829 million by 2022 from 404.1 million in 2017, according to Cisco's Visual Networking Index (VNI).

The trend is visible from the data consumption trends in India, where Internet networks expected to carry 646 petabytes of data per day by 2022, up from 108 petabytes of data per day in 2017.

The growth in data consumption is complemented by the growing number of connected devices which is expected to go up to 2.2 billion by 2022 from 1.6 billion in 2017.

Of this, smartphones are likely to account for 38 per cent, growing at a compound annual growth rate of 15.5 percent.

The proliferation of smart devices will propel India’s per capita traffic consumption to nearly 14 gigabytes by 2022 from 2.4 gigabytes in 2017, according to Cisco.

India is also expected to be a major driver of this with the total number of internet users expected to reach 840 million (60 per cent of the population) by 2022 from 357 million (27 per cent of the population) in 2017.

“By 2022, the smartphone data consumption will increase by 5X in India, which proves the dominance of smartphones as the communications hub for social media, video consumption, communications, and business applications, as well as traditional voice. As the usage and expectations increases, the opportunity in the market for service providers rises simultaneously. At the same time, it is also imperative for them to modernize network and embrace the latest technologies for efficient service delivery and build capacities to meet the bandwidth demand that market is demanding,” Sanjay Kaul, President, Asia-Pacific, and Japan, Service Provider Business, Cisco, said in a statement.

Cisco's VNI looks at the impact that users, devices and other trends will have on global IP networks over a five-year period.

• In India, there will be 2.2 billion networked devices by 2022, up from 1.6 billion in 2017.
• In India, smartphones will average 17.5 gigabytes per month, up from 3.5 GB in 2017.
• India's IP traffic grew 53 percent in 2017 and reached 3.3 exabytes per month in 2017, up from 2.1 exabytes per month in 2016.
• In India, the average fixed broadband speed grew 44 per cent from 2016 to 2017, from 6.6 Mbps to 9.5 Mbps.
• In India, 28 per cent of broadband connections will be faster than 10 Mbps in 2017.
• In India, Internet video traffic grew 73 per cent in 2017 and reach 13.5 exabytes per month by 2022, up from 1.5 exabytes per month in 2017.
• In India, total public Wi-Fi hotspots (including homespots) will grow 116-fold from 2017 to 2022 from 51.5 thousand in 2017 to 6.0 million by 2022.