The government data portal has released data on the number of internet subscribers in India over the last 5 years.
Internet Subscriber Base & Market Share Of Top 10 Internet Service Providers http://t.co/0ZvDkUnAFW #OpenData #India
— data.gov.in (@DataPortalIndia) April 1, 2014
Going by this data, the number of internet subscribers increased steadily until 2012, but then decreased a bit between 2012 and 2013.
The market grew 19% from 2009 to 10, 22% from 10 to 11, before slowing down to a growth of only 13% between 2011 and 2012, and actually decreasing by 5% to 2013.
The question is whether the market share growth varied by provider. The next two graphs show the total number of subscribers per provider and the market share of major providers, respectively. All data here is from data.gov.in
It is interesting that while BSNL continues to grow, the number of subscribers of MTNL has gone down. This graph also helps put perspective on how small Airtel is!
What would add to this analysis is data on how much data actually passes through the pipes of various providers – once that is taken into account, I think we should see that market share of providers such as Airtel and RCom (which supply to businesses) would b e much higher.