Opera published a study titled State of the Mobile Web, November 2009 which I found through TechCrunch. I can’t help but notice the tremendous growth in web usage through mobile phones in India. Page views have grown by 228.5% Y/Y and unique users have grown by 208.4% but if you look at metrics like page views per user or the amount of data transferred per user, you’ll see that they are quite small.

One of the reason is that in India we don’t have 3G (actually we do but it is limited to only one provider - BSNL) and browsing the Internet is painfully slow on GPRS connections. With 3G finally coming next year, I’m quite sure that the mobile web usage in India will just explode.

Right now the only kind of mobile applications that can work in India are SMS based. The increase in download speeds will make more people use the Internet and SMS will be less relevant, though that may take more time than a year. If 3G indeed is introduced by mid next year by prominent providers like Airtel and Vodaphone, I won’t be surprised to see Y/Y growth rate exceeding 500%.

Companies building products/services around SMS should start thinking about a mobile web strategy now.