Mobile Internet rates plunged by 93 per cent while data usage per user surged by over 25 times in three years to 2017, the Department of Telecom (DoT) said. "Cheapest tariff globally -- Rs 33 per GB in 2014 to Rs 21 per GB as on September 2017, tariff reduction of 93 per cent," DoT said in a tweet. The data war started following the entry of Reliance Jio in 2016. The company this year slashed the prices to as low as Rs 4 per GB per day.

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With falling mobile Internet rates, data usage also grew multi fold. "Average data usage per subscriber grew 25 times from 62 MB per month in 2014 to 1.6 GB per month in 2017," DoT tweeted. The mobile data consumption in India is now the highest in the world at 1.3 million GB per month--more than combined data usage in the US and China, the DoT said.

The penetration of smartphones in the country more than doubled from 190 million to 390 million and Internet users increased by about 66 per cent from 251 million to 429 million (in June 2017) between 2014-17.

The broadband access in the country increased from 61 million subscribers in March 2014 to 325 million subscribers in September 2017, the DoT said.

According to latest performance indicator of the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India, there were 445.9 million Internet subscribers at the end of December 2017.

The DoT data showed that during the three-year period, the mobile base stations in the country more than doubled from 7.9 lakh in May 2014 to 16.8 lakh by 2017-end.

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Telecom operators Bharti Airtel and Reliance Jio have committed to investing Rs 74,000 crore for the expansion of mobile networks by the end of 2018/19 fiscal year.