Erick@Techcrunch had an interesting post – The Internet from a global perspective. While US had the maximum number of Internet users (161.6 million), China was catching up fast (96 million).
With a user base of 25.2 million users, India came in at the 8th position. We (me included) keep whining about how Internet penetration in India is still negligible, but if you look at it from a global perspective, even with the pitiful penetration, we managed to come in at number 8. If the penetration increases by only 10% this year (wishful thinking), we’ll very easily jump two places in this list.
If you see the above penetration in terms of percentage of population, the table looks like below:
US – 53 %
china – 7.2 %
japan – 42.3%
germany – 40%
uk – 53.3%
france – 43.2%
south korea – 53%
India – 2.23%
And you can see exactly why China and India offer such a huge room for growth. The world’s most populous nations and the Internet penetration is still in single digits. Thanks to the forward looking communist regime, China is making tremendous progress in the Internet front (disregarding the online censorship, ‘great firewall’ etc.). Sadly, such aggressive efforts are still missing in India. The Indian Government’s initiative last year – “2007 – year of the broadband” was a big disappointment. Subscriber base grew at a much slower rate than projected. We need to act & act fast.
