New Delhi, 16 September 2026: Hours of scrolling, short reels and online video streaming on smartphones and tablets have broken all previous records of Internet usage in India. According to the latest circle-wise data of Telecom Regulatory Authority of India, Bihar has come first in the entire country in terms of daily internet data usage. The interesting thing is that the phone connection ratio i.e. tele-density in Bihar is the lowest in the country, yet the daily data usage there is the highest in the country.
According to telecom sector data, about 49.1 PB of data is used every day in Bihar, which is approximately 5,14,00,000 GB. In this list of daily data usage, Maharashtra is at second position with 48.7 PB and Uttar Pradesh (East) is at third position with 42.31 PB. In this list, Gujarat comes fourth with 42.2 PB and Madhya Pradesh comes fifth with 41.3 PB.
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YouTube is the first choice of internet users.
Even today YouTube remains the first choice of internet users across the country. YouTube's share in the total data consumption is 24.3 percent, which means that one-fourth of the data consumed on the Internet is spent only on watching videos. In this list, Instagram is at second place with 21.7 percent share and Facebook is at third place with 17.5 percent share. After that, the share of Google search and other online activities is 5.2 percent and the share of WhatsApp is 3.5 percent. Mainly, high definition video streaming on OTT, continuous watching of reels on social media and auto-updating of large files of apps in the background are the three main reasons for the data getting exhausted quickly.
According to Ericsson's June 2026 mobility report, per smartphone user in India uses an average of 37 GB data per month and this figure is expected to increase to 70 GB in the next 5 years. Due to the increasing demand for affordable 5G smartphones and fixed wireless access, 5G subscriptions in the country will exceed 1,10,00,00,00 (1.1 billion) by 2031, which will be 81% of the total mobile subscribers. By the end of 2025, there were 43,00,00,00 5G subscribers, which was 35 percent of the total mobile subscribers. Whereas the number of 4G subscribers is likely to decline from 57,00,00,00 by 2025 to 16,00,00,00 by 2031, because people are rapidly shifting to 5G.
Apart from this, the total number of broadband subscribers in the country has reached 1094.48 million in July 2026, in which the number of 5G fixed wireless access subscribers has increased from 12.94 million in June to 13.21 million in July. In the month of July itself, about 15.98 million customers had applied for mobile number portability, which shows that users are continuously changing companies for better network and data speed. These figures make it clear that in India the Internet is no longer just a means of communication but entertainment and social media are continuously pushing it forward.