The so-called digital revolution is seeing India make big strides, with 4G data transmission network being rolled out at a rapid pace across the country, but much remains to be done. According to the new Akamai report, India is ranked 105th in the world when it comes to average Internet broadband speed.
While the ranking is not very impressive, at the beginning of this year India was ranked 114th in the world. This shows an ongoing improvement in Internet speeds in the country. The average broadband speed has gone up from 3.5 Mbps to 4.1 Mbps in the last two quarters.
India also broke into the top-10 rankings in the IPv4 broadband connectivity chart, with 5.3 percent quarter on quarter growth. Now, the country has over 18 million unique IPv4 addresses. Thanks to the launch of Reliance Jio, IPv6 adoption shot up by a whopping 715 percent quarter-to-quarter and now it stands at 17 percent of all the traffic. Jio's 76 percent traffic comes from IPv6 contact.
The country's peak broadband speed also increased to 27.7 Mbps. Upto 30 percent of the connections in India are above 4 Mbps now, with a tremendous growth of 116 percent year-on-year. Similarly, with the year-on-year change of 189 percent, the connections above 10 Mbps stand at 6.6 percent.
One of the reasons behind rising Internet usage in India is the increasing number of free Wifi hotspots available. One of the largest providers is Google, which is implementing an ambitious program to make available free WiFi services to users in railway stations across the country. Google recently finished installing the service in the 100th railway station in partnership with RailTel. Some reports have suggested that Facebook is mulling setting up WiFi hotspots in rural areas in India.
And, consumers are certainly benefiting from the competitive environment in the 4G space kicked off by Reliance Jio. Other telecom operators have been forced to offer plans with free calling and better data bundles. Surely, the numbers are going to show much improvement in the coming year.
India