India ranks in the second position after the US in browsing the internet on

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mobile. Internet browsing is picking up among mobile users with India registering the second highest web page views using the handset. According to telecom research agency, Informate Mobile Intelligence, search engines are the most visited websites by users, followed by email and social networking websites.

The recent report shows that Google remains the top website accessed on the mobile web in terms of unique users followed by Gmail, Yahoo, Orkut and Getjar with close to 40 minutes spent on browsing every day. Facebook, too, remains a favourite. While the top applications in terms of reach were real player, visual radio, voice recorder and snake game.

Kedar Sohoni, president, Informate, said that data usage among subscribers is witnessing growth and is likely to increase once third generation (3G) services are available in the country.

“Operators cannot depend on voice revenue alone. They will have to look for other forms of revenue, which is likely to come from a database. Data is the next level of growth the market is looking at,” he said.

Around 30 per cent to 32 per cent of the total active time, which is approximately 50 minutes, is spent on communication. Sohoni said that entertainment and browsing together forms a significant portion of the active time spent (around one and half hours daily). The report also states that time spent on calling are comparatively high, but it has been showing a downward trend.

“On an average, 25 to 30 minutes of active time is spent on voice calls. Almost 15 to 20 minutes of the active time is spent on messaging. Time spent on chat shows upward trend,” the report states.

Telecom analyst, Mahesh Uppal said that internet data usage would witness much higher growth with better data speed.

“Once 3G services are rolled out in the country, the data services will witness a steep growth. Till recently, voice was the only form of communication subscribers used, but with the advent of the web on the phone, different forms of communication has evolved,” he said.

Clearly, what seemed till recently a very niche and exclusive segment, has become popular.