A new report from the Economic Survey of India suggests that the total volume of wireless data usage in India witnessed about 7 times a surge in 2017-18 to reach 32397 petabytes in the first quarter of 2021-22. Moreover, the average wireless data usage also spiked massively from just 1.4GB per month to thumping 14.1GB per month, the report further added. According to the report, telecom operators have capitalized on the fact that about 6.93 lakhs mobile towers were added across the country and have now built an infrastructure that works in correspondence to the government’s digital India campaign.
The Report from Economic Survey of India
As first reported by ET Telecom, the report gave the information on nationwide optical fibre network until the month of September which suggests that about 5.46 lakh kilometres of OFC have been laid down so far under the Bharat Net project. Furthermore, a total of 1.73 lakh gram panchayats (GP) have been connected via optical fibre cable with 1.59 lakh gram panchayats being ready for the OFC service. It is to be noted that, the Prime Minister had envisioned the connectivity of all 6 lakh villages of India via fibre cable in the next 1000 days during the last independence’s day speech. The report comes every year before the release of the union budget. Providing intel on the type of internet connections, the report stated that around 67.2% of the internet subscribers had a narrowband connection while 32.8% had broadband connections in 2015. This arrangement had completely reversed by the end of June 2021 as only 4% of the subscribers had narrowband connections while 96% had broadband connections. The report also added that the recent reforms brought in the telecom sector have resulted in flexibility and innovation enhancement which is necessary for the capricious post covid world. The survey report also appreciated the performance of the telecom sector during the challenging times of pandemic while other sectors struggled. It stated that there has been a massive spike in data consumption as more people have become dependent on it for online education, work from home, social media connect and virtual meetings which will now expand the broadband and telecom connectivity even more in the country.
