Ritesh

Something feels off with this chorus of “India’s internet is great and super cheap” … the data shows that Indian market is absolutely dominated by mobile. When they say it’s cheap and well connected factually this only applies to mobile usage. This makes sense because a tower connects thousands of subs instantly after construction and running fiber is a building by building or resident by resident job. This is also why “fixed wireless” has started growing fast. Follow the incentives. It’s the cheapest and shortest route to revenue. Due to this, India is amongst the highest mobile bandwidth usage populations on the planet. 30-40GB/month. (20-50% above US/UK usage) However, home Fiber lines in India pull closer to 300GB/month. 10x gap For context, that gap in the US and UK is 20-30x. It’s pretty ubiquitous that if you have access to a lot of more bandwidth you will use it. Bandwidth abundance does not favor mobile devices. I’d argue that it’s not very hard to believe that these paltry sub 5% fixed customer penetration numbers would be much higher if a cost effective alternative existed. Is that alternative existed it wouldn’t be crazy to expect to see the fixed customer numbers jump from 6% to maybe 10%, 15% or 20%. 100M-200M customers. And if the rest of the world is any precedent that would lead to a dramatic increase in overall bandwidth used. However, that would mean that mobile bandwidth usage would likely drop or stagnate with in home mobile usage.