China has 200m Internet video users, India 14. Digital divide to widen by 2014
Online video to emerge as top traffic generator on the Internet by the end of this year
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New Delhi:
A new survey of global data traffic by Cisco, the world's largest networking company, points to the widening digital divide between India and China.
According to the survey, India had one of the lowest proportion of people watching video on the Internet, an indication of the robustness of the country's Internet services.
It also had the distinction of having the slowest Internet video speeds as well.
The survey, called the Cisco Visual Networking Index 2009-14, predicted found India's average Internet video streaming speed to be around 400 Kbps for normal videos and 1 Mbps for high-definition, a third of what was found in most South East Asian countries.
The highest speeds were recorded by Korea and Japan, at 4.3 Mbps for hi-definition video, followed by the United States and Western Europe,with around 3.6 Mbps.
While other emerging countries such as china and Latin America such as china and Latin America also had similar numbers, India was the only 'low-speed' country which was not predicted to improve its video speeds by 2014.
The survey also found that only around 14 million out of the estimated 60 million total Internet users in India watched online video last year, an indication of the poor connection speeds in the country.
However, the figure is nearly double the number of broadband connections the country had in 2009. In comparison, at 198 million, China had nearly 14 times as many Internet video users last year - the highest number in the world.
According to the forecast, the number of Internet video consumers in India would go up to 42 million by 2014, according to the networking giant. However, China will still have ten times more video users at 414 million on 2014.
The survey also forecast two broader trends globally - the shift from download-and-watch to stream-and-watch, and the emergence of TV as a medium for consuming the Internet, particularly videos.
Ever since 2000, the biggest contributor of traffic to the Internet has been the user-to-user file sharing,
According to the survey, such traffic accounted for 37% of all Internet traffic last year, compared with just 15% contributed by browsing, chatting, email etc.
"However, 2010 is going to be a significant year in that file sharing is finally going to be dethroned by online video as the year-end," says Sharat Sinha, Cisco's director for service provider operations in Asia Pacific.
According to the report, video streaming - watching videos on websites like YouTube - will increase its share from 31% of the Internet this year to 36% in 2011.
