can i know how many internet usesr are in the state of gujarat?

these figures are real useful

I too expected better figures. But i hope this years report has a different story to tell as i expect these figures to be pretty huge this time. There is no doubt about the growth of Internet in India, the only constraints restricting this growth are poor service and the cost of internet access.

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Indians Definitely seems to be ahead in interne usage soon we will hit lanmark leaving behind many contory of the world

@Mohan, do you think the broadband service providers and the ISPs would now think of promoting or even investing in content-applications companies to boost their own sales?

iam asking this because my company ( www.citywalainfotech.com ) is working to bring Internet into everyday lives of urban Indians. We'd ensure that not only users spend more time on Internet, non-users also have a strong reason to convert.

This report suggests me that broadband companies should have a stronger motivation to invest in my company than VCs :)

Only by questioning numbers constantly will you get better numbers. So please be very suspicious of numbers and question them. Let us start by the telecom susbscibers number which are actually handed over to TRAI by Telecom Operators and fully and unquestionably accepted by them and the media and also by most of you:) More that 70 per cent connections in India are pre-paid and each number on an average is livef or 6-8 months… the numbers are not reallocated and are returned as active users:).
On the internet front the TRAI numbers given by the operators are very positive, accrding to them 38 million people subscribe to paid internet access on their mobile handsets. According to COMSCORE there are more than 35 million internet users in India EXCLUDING cyber cafes. Given these two sets of statistics, I would think Mohan and his team at IMRB have been great sceptics and given us the most rational numbers. The alternative is to use the NRS and IRS numbers which peg internet numbers at 11 and 12 million. The world of numbers is here, pick which one you want…

@Mohan - Quite a convoluted and non conclusive argument. Fact of the matter is that this kind of report will have more of sceptics than believers.

And I did not understand why were you trying to cite deficiencies of retail industry figures to prove the reliability of your report!!!!

My colleagues and I work on these reports…thanks for your comments as it helps us to work towards improving it further. Yes, the user estimate includes users at cyber cafes and at businesses.

To provide you some perspective - We have been tracking the internet since 1998 and have been working hard to ensure our sample is large, wide and dispersed to represent urban India (in our assessment, penetration is rural India is still abysmal to worry us right now but we are raring to expand sooner than later).

Conducting this survey does not make much commercial sense for us (we give this data free) but we have great faith in the internet as a medium for communication, entertainment and education that as a market research company, we are very curious to understand the Indian consumers. Hence, we have persisted with this study despite odds stacked against it.

The survey is based on industry accepted electoral roll based random sampling framework i.e. we meet individuals in home and project the sample back to the census data of households to esitmate users (the assumption is that every individual >8 yrs who accesses internet will reside in a home but may access anywhere - at office, cafe, home, school etc.). We classify users into "claimed users or ever user" i.e. people who claim to be using the internet and "active user" i.e. people who have used in the last 1 month. The reason is simple - India is a young country and people exaggerate their usage (unlike say "cigarrette consumption" where people play down - hence, the need in such researches is to meet respondents outside their home!). 

Finally, to give you some historical perspective, people used to hype the internet market for a long time (50 million and 100 million users were doing the rounds a few years back. These studies were based on back of the envelop numbers i.e. PC sold in last 5 yrs x 5 users per PC etc.,). Against this, certain other studies meant to measure other things (e.g. readership studies like NRS/IRS) tried to measure the internet user. Unfortunately, their methodologies were not suited to measure internet users and ended up underestimating the internet user market. Since they had their obvious flaws, the industry preferred the souped up figures (a good parallel is the retailing industry - the big consulting firms including the industry associations regulary add half a percent every year and I think the current year estimate is 4.5% is organised retailing- my question to them is this - do you have a consistent definition of what the numerator and denominator are? e.g. Is Nalli sarees organised or unorganised retailer?).

We have been working hard on these reports since 1998 and believe it is closer to the truth. We also conduct a bi-annual survey for MAIT which covers the home and office PC market (ie we go to homes and offices to estimate PC sales). In that study, we do track the internet dial-up and broadband penetration as well as the growth of cyber cafes. We are able to sew them across all these studies with a reasonably good level of agreement across (e..g A PC in a cyber cafe can support 60 unique internet users. At home, the figure has steadily risen from 1.8 persons per PC to 3.5 persons per PC and in office this figure has falled from 4 to much lower numbers recently).

Hence, we are confident of our figures and it does gel with the current broadband and internet penetration levels (for your info, we have worked on the CII broadband report as well). Hope that clarified and I assure you that due diligence has been done to ensure you use the figures with some level of assurance.

As always, there is a certain margin of sampling and non-sampling errors involved in these studies which we are aware of an try to keep under acceptable levels. The day we manage to eliminate these unavoidable errors, you can watch this space when we would have declared ourselves as Gods :)

Mudit: These are numbers for business plan presentations, and that's about it. Even if you develop segments, you'll extrapolate from these numbers. I'd go by the number of broadband and dialup connections. Any other figure will always be a guess.
Dinesh: I'm told they'll release the report next week.

When is the report expected to be out…

I would have expected a bigger number!

Hi Nikhil,

Are these figures inclusive of Internet usage in offices, in cyber-cafes?

Does this really qualify as internet penetration?

I am not sure whether I would put my marketing money on any plan that is based on these figures alone…