The ERNET network was only made available to educational and research communities. ERNET was initiated by the Department of Electronics (DoE), with funding support from the Government of India and United Nations Development Program (UNDP), involving eight premier institutions as participating agencies—NCST Bombay; Indian Institute of Science; five Indian Institutes of Technology at Delhi, Mumbai, Kanpur, Kharagpur, and Chennai; and the DoE in New Delhi. It is estimated that by 2017, internet users in India are most likely to be in a range of 450-465 million. The frequency of internet access among urban internet users in India is close to 51% or 137.19 million of internet users are using internet on a daily basis (at least once a day). On the other hand, 242 million or 90% of the urban internet user's use internet once a month. Analysis of ‘daily users' reveals that they are both in urban and rural India.
TopIntroduction
The history of the internet in India began with the launch of the Educational Research Network (ERNET) in 1986. The first publicly available internet service in India was launched by state-owned Videsh Sanchar Nigam Limited (VSNL) on 14 August 1995. As of May 2014, the Internet was delivered to India mainly by 9 different undersea fibres, including SEA-ME-WE 3, Bay of Bengal Gateway and Europe India Gateway, arriving at 5 different landing points. India also has one overland internet connection, at the city of Agartala near the border with Bangladesh.[2]As of 31 December 2018, India had a population of 130 crore people (1.3 billion), 123 crore (1.23 billion) Aadhaar digital biometric identity cards, 121 crore (1.21 billion) mobile phones, 44.6 crore (446 million) smartphones, 56 crore (560 million) internet users up from 481 million people (35% of the country's total population) in December 2017, and 51 per cent growth in e-commerce. Government has embarked on the massive Bharat Net, Digital India, Made in India and Start-up India initiatives to expedite the internet-based eco-system (Internet India, 2019).
History of Internet
The history of the internet in India began with the launch of the Educational Research Network (ERNET) in 1986. The network was only made available to educational and research communities.[5] ERNET was initiated by the Department of Electronics (DoE), with funding support from the Government of India and United Nations Development Program (UNDP), involving eight premier institutions as participating agencies—NCST Bombay, Indian Institute of Science, five Indian Institutes of Technology at Delhi, Mumbai, Kanpur, Kharagpur and Chennai, and the DoE in New Delhi. ERNET began as a multiprotocol network with both the TCP/IP and the OSI-IP protocol stacks running over the leased-line portion of the backbone. Since 1995, however, almost all traffic is carried over TCP/IP. The first leased line of 9.6 kbit/s was installed in January 1991 between Delhi and Mumbai. ERNET was allotted Class B IP address 144.16.0.0 by Inter NIC in 1990. Subsequently, Class C addresses were allotted to ERNET by APNIC. All IITs, IISc Bangalore, DOE Delhi and NCST Mumbai were connected by 9.6 kbit/s leased line by 1992. In the same year, 64 kbit/s Internet gateway link was commissioned from NCST Mumbai to UUNet in Virginia, United States (Twenty years of Internet in India, 1995).