The Decade of Data

No, wait, data is not ‘the new oil’. Nor gold. Data is the new sex, a sanskari strain. Everyone wants it, wants to control it and make money of it

- Prasanto K. Roy

ZOOM AWAY FROM our planet on a spaceship, and it fades into insignificance, a grey-blue speck with 8 billion people fighting over insignificant things. But that pale blue dot near an average sun is building up quite a database. By 2020, the amount of data on Earth should reach 44 zettabytes, each making up a billion terabytes. That’s 40 times more bytes than there are stars in the observable physical universe, 90 billion light years across.

When the history of this millennium is written, it’s very likely that its second decade will be remembered as the one when data exploded, driven by smartphones, 4G and the internet. Over 4.5 billion internet users are churning out a couple of trillion photos every year. They are uploading 300 hours of video every minute to YouTube, where 1.3 billion users watch 5 billion videos a day. Then there is Netflix, which accounts for 15 per cent of the world’s internet bandwidth, streaming into Indian homes, uncensored for now.

Nearly 700 million of those internet users are in India, almost all of them mobile subscribers. In the decade gone by, India’s mobile universe doubled from 600 million to 1,200 million subscriptions. More significantly, the country’s broadband user base went up from nearly zero at the beginning of the decade of data to 600 million today. It was slow going in the first half of the decade, with negligible wireline broadband, very little public WiFi, and early 4G offerings from a handful of operators led by Airtel.