50% new Internet subscribers from tier-II towns

LUCKNOW: Internet usage is increasing rapidly in non-metro cities, so much so that more than 50% of the new subscribers are from these tier-II towns.

Senior Director, Yahoo India, Nitin Mathur said that the trend in internet usage is changing fast with metros which dominated the scene just a year back giving way to the non metro towns now.

He said that currently there are an estimated 8 crore net users of which would increase to 24 crore by 2015.

"Internet penetration is very low in India right now as compared to other nations. It would surely touch 24 crore by 2015 and given the size of India’s population this too would not be enough. But we see more and more people using internet through mobile devices rather than PC’s. Even right now of the 8 crore internet users more than 2.5 crore access it through mobile devices. As 3G enabled handsets become cheap mobile internet would be the next big thing in the country which would take penetration to the remote corners of the country" said Nitin Mathur.

He said that Yahoo India currently reaches 81.7% on internet population in India.

He said that they are working towards introducing email services in regional Indian languages. Currently lots of regional language content is available on Yahoo and they would take it forward by introducing email services in local languages too.

The company has started a "Learn with Yahoo" program which educates and trains new users on various aspects of internet including email, search, and internet safety etc.