Broadband

Will India see an Internet inflection point by 2015?

I was too lazy to come up with a headline, so decided to reuse the heading of the article I wrote in 2012 “Will India see an Internet inflection point by 2014?“. Reliance Industries is going to be investing in a big way at home, in India – $30 billion over the next 3 years! In yesterday’s Reliance AGM few announcements made that would interest the internet industry in India are,

4G broadband business under Reliance Jio will be the “most transformational initiatives of Reliance” over the next few years
Reliance to invest INR 70,000 crore ($11.7 billion) in its telecom business
Mukesh Ambani said limited field trials with initial set of services are already underway and “the year 2015 will see the phased launch of Reliance Jio across India”
Expanded field trials will commence in August 2014 in multiple cities and continue through the end of 2014 and early 2015
Reliance Jio plans to roll out fourth-generation (4G) telecommunications services in 2015
The network and broadband services will initially cover all states, all the 5,000 towns and cities accounting for over 90 per cent of urban India and over 215,000 villages.
Eventually, the network will encompass 600,000 villages

Way back in 2009 I had written India needs a Minister for Internet, now we have a Prime Minister who believes in the internet, especially in social media. We do hope his new policies will give a big boost to the internet industry. Moreover, PM Modi may give a big boost to the usage of Indian languages, especially Hindi.

Unfortunately, the government’s National Optic Fibre Network (NOFN) project is going slow, the projections for this year have been halved.

We eagerly wait to see this rolling out. 65% of India’s population is below the age of 35. This kind of sudden increase in broadband penetration is a big boost to Indian language portals (to be read as Oneindia.in !)

Also see,

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.