Few days back I have written a blog at SiliconIndia, where I proposed the idea of National Broadband Plan-2020 for India. But after writing the blog, I was attacked by few of my friends who thought the idea is totally rubbish & I am trying to sell my company’s agenda. Despite this fact, here I am, stressing on the need of Broadband in households irrespective of what I try to sell or buy on my independent blog platform.
Telegeography, a leading telecom market research firm, has tracked the Home broadband service provision in 127 countries and came up with a report highlighting few facts about Home broadband penetration rates. Here are few facts:
- Only Ten countries have achieved the penetration rate of > 80{af589cdba9d77786c8c861317dbad60bba1e2ebbf56e2ffab874a1b59fde9ce3}, which includes South Korea, Singapore, Hong-Kong, UAE, Denmark etc.
- None of the above markets are huge & total market opportunity doesn’t have a ceiling of 100{af589cdba9d77786c8c861317dbad60bba1e2ebbf56e2ffab874a1b59fde9ce3}- the interesting fact to mention about these markets.
- Fifty countries have more broadband penetration between 20-80{af589cdba9d77786c8c861317dbad60bba1e2ebbf56e2ffab874a1b59fde9ce3}, which represents the huge potential of broadband expansion opportunity.
- While 36 countries have penetration less than 5{af589cdba9d77786c8c861317dbad60bba1e2ebbf56e2ffab874a1b59fde9ce3}; 88 countries even couldn’t have measurable penetration on scale. Together, these two represent the potential of 700 million subscribers.
- Less than 2{af589cdba9d77786c8c861317dbad60bba1e2ebbf56e2ffab874a1b59fde9ce3} households in Africa are having broadband at home, compared to 68{af589cdba9d77786c8c861317dbad60bba1e2ebbf56e2ffab874a1b59fde9ce3} in US.
Facts & market potential apart, we ‘India’ are still having broadband penetration less than 1{af589cdba9d77786c8c861317dbad60bba1e2ebbf56e2ffab874a1b59fde9ce3}. As per May-09 count, we have approx 7 million broadband subscribers in India. The figure doesn’t clarify how many of them are household & business users. So in terms of home broadband subscriber numbers, we fair even worse. Probably we come under category of those 88 countries which couldn’t even make it to scale. How poor!
Broadband can’t be an individual perspective; nor it is industry promotion. We do need broader outlook to help people understand how effective it would be if you could have a broadband connection at home. But yes, focus should be on need & applications, while promoting broadband in India; speed is less likely to catch attention in coming days. Till then, we will happily 😉 lie at the bottom of pyramid.
