A new analysis by research group Forrester Research predicts that by 2013, India will be ranked third in the list of countries with the most number of Internet users, surpassed only by China and USA.
The report states that the number of people online around the world will grow more than 45 percent to 2.2 billion users over the next five years, with Asian countries driving the growth.
“Asia remains the biggest global Internet growth engine: 43 percent of the world’s online population will reside in Asia by 2013, with 17 percent of the global online population in China. Growth rates in the US, Western Europe, and the major industrialized nations in Asia Pacific such as Australia, Japan, and South Korea will slow to between 1 percent and 3 percent,” the report said.
While the report did not state the exact number of Internet users that India would have, best estimates put the current number at around 70 million.
It is also unclear as to what kind of Internet usage this is, and thus has no implications about broadband penetration, high-speed wireless access or otherwise.
INDIANS AMONG TOP 10 TWEETERS
Meanwhile, another analytics firm, Sysmos, released a report that said that India was among the 10 largest countries with active Twitter populations.
In actual numbers, though, it’s quite a small amount as India has only 0.87 per cent of the total Twitter users in the world.
The US leads the pack with 62.14% of the total Twitter population, while the UK is second at 7.87% and Canada third at 5.69%.