Net penetration in India poised for a growth

New Delhi: India has only two unique Internet Protocol (IP) addresses per 1,000 people. But a just-released study says the country's net penetration could significantly increase in the coming years, with its economic boom and growing IT adoption.

Every machine that is permanently connected to the Internet has a unique identifying number, called an IP address. A typical IP address looks like this: 59.95.29.46.

A study by web application acceleration and performance management major Akamai saw 20 lakh unique IPs from India. With this, India ranked 14th in terms of unique IPs, a growth of 4.5 per cent over the last quarter, reports IANS.

Perhaps reflecting its large population base, the country had 0.002 IPs per capita - translating to two unique IP addresses per 1,000 people.

India also ranked 15th in terms of attack traffic origination in Q2, contributing one per cent to observed global attack traffic.These are countries where bots and hackers are based and originating from, which Akamai is observing through its network. It is indicative of bots and crackers (malevolent hackers) who are trying to compromise vulnerable systems.

"Japan and the US have almost 50 per cent of the observed attacks originating from them. India contributes to one per cent of attack traffic origination," commented Akamai India marketing manager Karthikeyan D.S.

The per centage of broadband connections from India with speeds above 5 Mbps (high broadband) and 2 Mbps (broadband) were 0.6 per cent and 4.6 per cent respectively, Akamai's study said.

Reflecting the mainly-slow speed but still spreading nature of India's Internet access, high broadband IP per capita was 0.01 (1 IP with speeds above 5 Mbps per 100,000 people).

The per centage of connections with speeds less than 256 Kbps from India was 26 per cent, meaning nearly one-fourth of users use slower-speed lines to get on to the net.

India has an estimated 32-46 million active Internet users.

The number of users has been growing at over 25 per cent per year for the past three years.

Akamai Marketing and Product Management Head Bruno Goveas said that the growth in India reflected a good positive trend. There's opportunity in the Indian market".

He argued that unique IPs were one of the "best representations" for traffic on the net. Akamai has a global deployment of 36,000 servers in 1,000 networks and in 79 countries, he said.

"In India, our servers are present in all major ISPs. We look at and are constantly monitoring issues such as performance, packet loss issues, connectivity. Ours is an overlay network, located in all major ISPs," he said, declining to mention specific numbers of ISPs.

This report said several new submarine fibre initiatives were announced during the quarter, which, when completed, will improve Internet connectivity between Europe, India, and the Middle East.