Internet

Internet traffic to grow 7 fold by 2015, Asia to be growth centre

According to Asia Will Become the New Center of the Internet (and the Press Release), North America will not be the highest source of web traffic. The report talks about the generator of web traffic, i.e. the users. Would be interesting to know what would be their source of information? Would they consume content relevant to their region or would they continue to consume content from US (HuffPost, Youtube)?

China, South Korea, Japan would be important contributors to web traffic from Asia. India doesn’t figure in the list. Not good.

When it comes to data transfer, we hear about Giga and Terabytes. As the consumption keeps increasing terabytes won’t fit the bill. You will hear about petabytes (1000 terabytes), zettabytes (1 billion terabytes).

Few points from that report,

Internet traffic will grow seven-fold between 2010 and 2015 to reach roughly 1.2 zettabytes globally, and by 2015
Total global traffic will reach 1.2 million petabytes — or roughly 1.2 zettabytes
50% of the traffic would be from videos.
Cloud applications (especially backup apps) will contribute significantly to web traffic.
China is expected to have 670 million Internet users by 2015.
Asia, not North America, will be the dominant region with a 42% share by 2015

While I don’t have access to the entire report, India doesn’t seem to figure anywhere. I still believe WiMax (wireless broadband) and not 3G will contribute to the growth of internet penetration in India.

We already see a phenomenal increase in the consumption of videos in India (courtesy teens). This will only grow further.

Hosting/bandwidth costs in India have to fall by a great extent (at least 50%). Majority of Indian content portals need to be hosted in India and not outside India. That would help the user experience which will translate to increase in consumption of web content from India.

Few internet statistics related numbers from India (source: Google, March 2011),

India is the 3rd biggest Internet market globally
Over 100 million internet user base
The market has grown 20 times during 2005-2010
40 million people in India access the Internet from work
30 million access net from cyber cafes
11 million households have a broadband connection
40 million access internet from their mobile phones

BG Mahesh

Internet application ideator and implementor. Been there and done that since early 1990s. I like to present data to the common man in the simplest manner on the internet.