Indian Mobile Users to Grow to 990 Million by 2020: Cisco

The number of mobile users in India is projected to grow at a CAGR of 4.4 percent to 990.2 million, covering about 71 percent of the country's population, by 2020 from 798.4 million last year, according to a report by networking giant Cisco.

Also, mobile data traffic generated is forecast to grow 12-fold to reach 1.7 exabytes (about 430 million DVDs) per month by 2020, driven by availability of cheaper smartphones and affordable data tariffs, said Cisco's Mobile Visual Networking Index released on Wednesday.

Mobile data traffic was about 148.9 petabytes (34 million DVDs worth of data) per month in 2015.

"With the ever-increasing billions of people and things that are being connected, mobility is the predominant medium that's enabling today's global digitisation transformation," Cisco Vice President Service Provider Marketing Doug Webster said.

Future mobile innovations in cellular like 5G and Wi-Fi solutions will be needed to further address new scale requirements, security concerns, and user demands, he added.

The report said 4G connections in India are expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 144 percent in 2015-2020, accounting for 26.2 percent of the total mobile connections by 2020.

3G connections are forecast to be 52.6 percent of the total mobile connections by 2020, compared to 15.7 percent in 2015, it added.