India ranks 39th in Asia Pacific on fixed broadband

India ranks a low 39th in terms of fixed broadband adoption among Asia Pacific countries, with just 1.3 per cent of its citizens subscribing to such a service in 2015, according to a study by the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP). India ranks lower than countries such as Bhutan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh in fixed broadband subscriptions per 100 inhabitants in ESCAP

countries in 2015, according to the report ‘State of ICT in Asia and the Pacific 2016: Uncovering the Widening Broadband Divide’ released . Hong Kong, New Zealand, Japan, Macao, Australia and Singapore topped the list of 53 countries covered in the report. According to the latest ITU data for 2015, more than half of the global fixed broadband subscriptions are from Asia and the Pacific (52.3 per cent).

This is followed by Europe (21.9 per cent) and North America (14.1 per cent). The report pointed out that this was a dramatic increase from 2005 when subscriptions in the ESCAP region merely constituted 38.1% of the global total fixed broadband subscriptions, followed by Europe (28.6 per cent) and North America (26.5 per cent). However, the subscriptions per 100 inhabitants in the ESCAP region is behind Latin America and the Caribbean, and far lower than Europe and North America. Fixed broadband penetration in Asia and the Pacific is even below the world’s average of 11.2 subscriptions per 100 inhabitants in 2015.