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Comment by user5994461 | Hacker News Reader

If you look at the internet users per country: http://www.internetlivestats.com/internet-users-by-country/

India has 462M people who can access internet at home, among 1326M inhabitants. That is a less lot than what one would think at first.

Given that most companies reading HN are americans and some europeans. That brings the question of should we bother for the Indian market (early or at all)?

Cultural barriers + Language issues and translations + TimeZone + A market which may not be that big and be fragmented or inaccessible

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There are some issues with that claim (462M): http://www.medianama.com/2013/07/223-calling-the-bluff-on-in....

The page I gave is for July 2016. It states that a "user" is someone who have access internet at home, at anytime of the day. No matter what device is used.

Your page is old and complaining that the number of 485M given in 2012-2013 was overinflated. That seems about right given that the last numbers are still a bit under that by now.

On a different topic. Ut looks like only 10-20% of connections are wired (e.g. broadband). The rest is wireless (probably mobile data)

That seems important to know if going for that market. (red: target phone, bad bandwidth, bad latency.)

Those numbers would grow as most users move to smart phones. Mobile would be their Internet enabled device.English would still be common language. Millions are using WhatsApp typing in Hinglish, kannglish etc(typing in local language kb is cumbersome)

Not quite - Swalekh is a local language + English keypad app with native and phonetic modes. You can type a Kannada word in English and have it translated to Kannada script. It also ensures you don't mis-spell and has a low footprint on mobile phones.

There are still tons of Indians who speak English, which may be a small percentage, but a huge market overall (for example, 5% of 1326M is 66.3M).

True. And that may be the reason the Indian digital space never took off - cause we had the luxury of that tiny market. In China, and elsewhere, markets in various services took off because they spoke Chinese, and that's likely in India as well.It's already happened in TV, in print, on Radio - even MTV speaks "Indian" :)

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