Chennai: The access to the Internet continues to be abysmally low at 9 per cent in the rural areas while the urban centres enjoy a mere 53 per cent in India. This is so despite the high density of mobile phones / smartphones penetration.
“The digital divide is wide and it continues to hamper development and access to data from remote parts of India,” claims Bruce Lawson, Opera’s Global CTO.
Only 9 per cent of the rural areas and 53 per cent in urban areas are connected. And in most cases, the subscribers pay a hefty sum for the internet pack and spend long hours in downloading data.
The number of mobile Internet users in India is projected to grow 21 per cent to reach 371 million by June 2016 from 306 million in December 2015, according to a recent report released by the Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAM AI) and market research firm IMRB International.
As per the study, the share of mobile Internet spending out of the average monthly bill for mobile phones has increased to 64 per cent in 2015 as against 54 per cent in 2014. On the other hand, the overall average monthly bill came down by 18 per cent to '360 in 2015 as compared to last year.
This indicates that consumers are engaging more through data for connectivity in order to cut the money spent on voice data. The usage was led by activities such as online chatting (76 per cent) and social networking (73 per cent) in 2015.
“In an effort aimed at empowering the people with power of the Internet and also save money on data pack, we launched the Opera Max offering data compressed by 50 per cent. And we have seen five million users since its launch in May,” Mr Bruce, who was in the city, said on Saturday.
He went on to add that there has been tremendous response from the users to the Opera Mini browser on the Android platform launched on Jan. 26 supporting 90 languages including 13 Indian languages — Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Kashmiri, Malayalam, Marathi, Oriya, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu.
With its servers located in Iceland, Amsterdam and China, the popular mobile browser — Opera Mini, searches the files, images or videos from any location, compresses them and sends to the users really fast.
India, Indonesia, Russia, Nigeria, Bangladesh, China, Ukraine, Pakistan, Mexico, South Africa, Philippines, Mexico and Brazil are its biggest users.
