India to have over 800 million smartphone users by 2022: Cisco study

The number of smartphone users is expected to double to 829 million by 2022 from 404.1 million in 2017, projects a new Cisco report.

This proliferation of smart devices will propel India's per capita data consumption to nearly 14 gigabytes (GB) by 2022 from 2.4 GB in 2017,  according to Cisco's latest "Visual Networking Index (VNI)" report.

"By 2022, the smartphone data consumption will increase by five time in India --  which proves the dominance of smartphones as the communications hub for social media, video consumption, communications, and business applications, as well as traditional voice," Sanjay Kaul, President, Asia-Pacific and Japan, Service Provider Business, Cisco, said in a statement on Monday.

The Internet is made up of thousands of public and private networks around the world. And since it came to life in 1984, more than 4.7 zettabytes of IP traffic have flowed across it.

One zettabyte is approximately equal to a thousand exabytes, a billion terabytes, or a trillion gigabytes.

In India alone, IP networks carried 108 petabytes of data per day in 2017 and are expected to reach 646 petabytes per day by 2022.

This is primarily driven by the growth in the number of smartphone users, said the report.

By 2022, smartphones will account for 44 per cent of total Internet traffic, up from 18 per cent in 2017.

In 2018, PCs accounted for 41 percent of total IP traffic, but by 2022 PCs will account for only 19 per cent of IP traffic, the research showed.

Saying that more traffic will be created in 2022 than in the 32 years since the Internet started, the report added that India will be a major driver of this with the total number of Internet users reaching 840 million (60 per cent of the population) by 2022 from 357 million (27 per cent of the population) in 2017.