Mobile users in India, on an average, consumed 10 GB of mobile data per user per month in December 2018, a year-on-year growth of 69%, driven by popularity of video streaming applications, according to a report by Nokia.
Titled ‘Mobile Broadband India Traffic,’ the report added that the increase in the consumption of data across the country led to overall growth of data traffic by 109% with 4G technology constituting 92% of this growth.
“This growth is led by the growing popularity of video streaming and video content in local languages on the various over-the-top (OTT) applications. The emergence of new media apps, like TikTok, has further led to an increase in video consumption,” the report said.
Video streaming continues to remain a major contributor to mobile data traffic constituting 70-80% of the total traffic.
“The surge in broadband consumption is likely to continue in the next few years since the current broadband penetration is just 45% in the country,” Sanjay Malik, head of India market, Nokia said.
As per the report, WhatsApp and Instagram are the leading social networking apps among mobile subscribers, while YouTube was the most popular video streaming app followed by Hotstar and JioTv.
The report noted that the 4G growth had come at the cost of 3G data traffic, which had suffered a marginal decline in 2018. “By the end of 2018, there were more than five times as many 4G subscribers as there were 3G subscribers.”
This was driven by significant drop in data tariffs, coupled with the availability of economical 4G devices. Smaller cities and towns experienced the highest increase in 4G traffic in 2018.
