Mobile data usage increases twofold in past 3 years

With more and more people accessing the internet through their mobile phones, mobile data usage in the country has more than doubled in the past three years as per the data available with the Department of Telecommunications (DoT).

As per Factly, barring 2012-13 when the absolute number of telephone connections went down by more than 50 million compared to the previous year, the absolute number of telephone connections has been continuously increasing every year. For the past two years, the increase, in fact has been to the tune of almost 60 million each year. The drop in 2012-13, it says was primarily due to the removal of inactive mobile telephone connections by various service providers.

The overall tele density also increased from 75.23 percent in March 2014 to 82.93 percent in February 2016. Rural tele density increased by 6.62 percent and stands at 50.63 percent as in February 2016.The mobile data usage which has more than doubled in three years increased from 5.87 lakh TB in 2013-14 to 13.84 lakh TB in 2015-16 (up to Feb’16).

It is also important to note that as the proportion of mobile data usage by private operators is increasing, the same is seeing a downtrend with public sector operators like MTNL and BSNL. The data usage for private players surged to 93.8 percent from 92.3 percent in 2013-14. For public companies, it decreased from 7.7 percent in 2013-14 to 6.2 percent in 2015-16 (till Feb’16)

The findings from DoT also brief about annual Minutes of Usage (MoU). From 2.87 lakh crore annual minutes in 2010-11, it has reached 4.1 lakh crore annual minutes in 2014-15. MoU increased by over 16 percent in 2011-12 compared to the previous year while it increased by only 2 percent in 2012-13. In 2013-14, it again increased by a substantial 14.6 percent while the increase was a mere 5.1 percent in 2014-15.