Anexo: Formato de Recolección de Datos

Similar to other countries, the rise of the Internet infrastructure in India started with the launch of their Educational Research Network (ERNET) as a joint effort of the Indian Department of Electronics and the United Nations Development Program, in 1986 (ERNET, 2016). The network of ERNET interconnected eight institutions including the Indian Department of Electronics, the five Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT) at Delhi, Bombay, Kanpur, Kharagpur and Madras (Chennai), the National Centre for Software Technology in Bombay and the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore. Later in 1995, India joined the commercial Internet when Videsh Sanchar Nigam Limited (VSNL) formally launched their Gateway Internet Access Service (GIAS) in Bombay, Delhi, Kolkata and Chennai with the following message:

‘VSNL India’s Gateway to the world welcomes you to surf the cyberspace’ (VSNL, 1996, p.23).

The access to the VSNL gateway came at a cost of INR 25,000 (approx. US$ 389.18 (XE.com, 2016)) for 250 hours of TCP/IP accounts at a speed of 9.6 kbps (kilobits per second). In just six months, VSNL added 10,000 Internet users to the Gateway Internet Access Service, while access was limited to New Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata and Chennai (Fennell et. al., 2016). As of July 2016, India is estimated to have reached 46.2 crore (462 million) Internet users, representing a penetration level of roughly 34.80% of the Indian population, according to the Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI) report stated in Internet World Stats (2016). The penetration rate mentioned by Internet World Stats (2016) corresponds to India having 25.80% of all Asian Internet users. However, the available statistics on the Indian Internet access and penetration rates vary wildly in the academic, business and governmental sources. As of January 2016, Statista (2016a) reports that India has a considerably lower number of 375 million Internet users, compared to the 462 million in the Internet World Stats (2016). For 2015, the International Telecommunications Union country profile for India marks that 26.00% of the individuals are using the Internet (ITU, 2015d). This corresponds to approximately 340.86 million Internet users, when combined with the World Bank (2016a) Indian population statistics during the same year. The World Bank (2016a) itself states that India had 43.99 Internet users per 100 inhabitants in 2015, which would correspond to

staggering 576.81 million Internet users. Overall, the statistics on the number of Internet users shows large variations depending on the source. Nevertheless, these differences are not surprising considering that a larger number of the Indian population accesses the Internet through shared access or Cyber Cafés, representing a dominant share of 37.00% of Internet access back in 2010 (TRAI, 2010, p.24). Another method for accessing the Internet is through Kiosk operators in rural panyachats, providing wireless connections through accessing the (incumbent) telecom provider networks from county towns (Jhunjhunwala, Ramachandran and Bandyopadhyay, 2004). These examples show that Internet access solutions for rural India are especially creative, which makes it very challenging to trace the number of end-users accessing the Internet. One solution to this measurement issue is the recently introduced ‘Aadhar’ digital identifier by the Indian government. Since every mobile broadband operator is obliged to make use of this identifier, we expect Internet access statistics to become more transparent in the upcoming years.

Globally, approximately two-thirds of the 3.2 billion people that were online by the end of 2015 were from developing countries as estimates of the International Telecommunications Union state (ITU, 2015a). However, 4 billion people (two-third of the world’s population) remained offline in 2015 (ITU, 2015a). Moreover, most of the offline population resides in developing countries such as India. However, International Organisations have not yet reached a full consensus on whether India should still be considered as a developing country: while the United Nations (2016) considers India as a ‘developing nation’ in their Standard Country and Area Codes for Statistical Use, the World Bank (2016b) raised India’s ranking to a ‘lower-middle income country’ in 2015. Considering India’s number of Internet users compared to their total population of 1.311 billion in 2015 reveals that also a large portion of the Indian population remains offline (World Bank, 2016a). The Indian population that could access the Internet were mostly using wireless, rather than wireline, means of narrowband and broadband connections, where wireline corresponds to wired broadband technologies and wireless to cordless ones. The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI, 2016c) statistics provides reliable data on the means of Internet connectivity usage since each subscription corresponds to a registration. TRAI (2016c) notes in their Performance Indicator report that India reached a total number of 345.60 million Internet subscribers in 2016, representing a different statistic to the number of Internet users. However, the key variation in these statistics seems to be based on the differences between ‘broadband

subscription’ and ‘broadband user’, since a multitude of users is frequently sharing a single subscription with their families and peers. The actual number of Indian Internet users remains a mystery until the ‘Aadhar’ identifiers system is well established. Hence, we will use the Internet usage data given by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India as illustrated in Table 2-1 below. In detail, the total number of Indian Internet subscribers corresponds to 21.26 million wired Internet subscribers, 0.62 million Fixed wireless Internet subscribers (Wi-Fi, Wi-Max, Radio or VSAT connections) and staggering 345.60 million mobile wireless Internet subscribers in September 2016 (TRAI, 2016c, p.28). Moreover, the number of total Internet subscribers is divided between 247.69 million urban subscribers and 119.79 million rural ones. On a per 100 inhabitant basis, every second urban-living Indian (61.98%) have a smartphone subscription but for rural areas, this figure declines, where circa one in ten (13.65%) people has a smartphone subscription (TRAI, 2016c, ii), representing 44.19 million rural Internet subscribers.

Indian Internet subscriber base per segments in September 2016

Internet subscriber segments Number of Subscribers in _{millions (TRAI, 2016c)}

Total Internet subscribers 367.48

Wireless Internet subscribers 346.22

Mobile Wireless (Phone + Dongle) 345.60 Fixed Wireless (Wi-Fi, Wi-Max, Radio & VSAT) 0.62

Wired Internet subscribers 21.26

Broadband subscribers 192.30

Narrowband subscribers 175.18

Urban Internet subscribers 247.69

Rural Internet subscribers 119.79

Urban Broadband 148.11

Urban Narrowband 99.58

Rural Broadband 44.19

Rural Narrowband 75.60

Table 2-1: Indian broadband subscriber base per segment, Source: TRAI (2016c).