The growth of internet usage is growing exponentially and India is one of the countries growing in fast phase. As per Wikipedia internet users status, India has the second largest number of internet users behind China and ahead of United States.
Internet Growth in India
It all happened in last two decades and no one would have really expected that internet will change the life in such a short span of time. Here is the list of events to show the history of internet growth in India.
- Before 1995 internet was only used by military and research purposes without access to public. On the independence day of 1995, internet was offered to public in six cities through telephone connection. People should pay at least for 100 hours with the per hour payment of Rs 35.
- 1996 – some news publishers opened websites for their own publications.
- 1997 – Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) was formed to provide transparent environment in telecommunication.
- 1998 – Sabeer Bhatia sold his Hotmail to Microsoft for $400 million. Also the private sector companies started offering internet services to public.
- 1999 – Lot of internet companies were opened leading to dot com bubble.
- 2000 – Indian parliament passed information technology act. Also popular companies like Yahoo! started their Indian branches.
- 2001 – Indian railway started the online booking through internet website.
- 2002 – Internet telecom companies got approval from government for establishing under ocean network cables.
- 2003 – First Indian online flight booking was started.
- 2004 – BSNL started broadband services and broadband policy was release by Indian telecom ministry.
- 2005 – Google launched its social networking site Orkut.
- 2006 – Facebook started services to Indian users.
- 2008 – Apple’s iPhone was introduced in India.
- 2010 – 3G spectrum was offered on auction.
- 2011 – Government introduced the service to switch internet connection without changing the phone number.
- 2012 – Number of worldwide internet users reached 250 crores (2.5 billion).
- 2013 – There were 161 companies offering internet services during mid of the year.
- 2014 – India became the third largest internet users community with around 20 crore users.
- 2015 – Facebook started internet.org scheme partnered with Reliance Communications. Later the internet.org scheme was banned by Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI).
- 2016 – TRAI decided to continue net neutrality by rejecting the proposal of charing different amount for accessing different sites and services.
Leave a Reply
Your email is safe with us.