India has traditionally been known for its cellular service potential. But the cellular services will soon have to share focus with broadband services as well since the country is all set to register the highest growth in broadband subscriber base by 2013.

India is estimated to move from its current position at number 18 in the world for broadband market and jump to attain the number 6 rank. This will be achieved at a mind-boggling growth rate of 489%. This is the highest growth rate expected from any market and is almost the double from the second highest growth market i.e. Vietnam (276%).

Broadband services as a whole will grow by 67 percent over the next five years to reach landmark 680 million connections worldwide. This is a significant surge as compared to yearly growth rate of 28% registered for broadband services from 2004 to 2008.

The growth of the services is likely to be from the developing markets including the merging markets like Russia, India, China, Brazil while countries like South Korea, Japan and Denmark are close to saturation level.

“With its burgeoning economy and huge population India will zoom up the rankings of the largest broadband countries in the world. Currently at number 18 in the charts it will hit number 6 by the end of 2013,” said Tim Johnson, Chief Analyst at Point Topic, the firm behind the research.

“Central and South America will see the most high-growth countries.  Brazil will shortly enter the top 10 broadband countries in the world, most likely before the end of 2008, and again with a decent economic base and a large population hungry for bandwidth it will outperform most other countries in the next 5 years," he added.

The firm says that even though the subscriber base may sound lucrative there is still scope for growth after the five years as only two-third of world’s population wil have access to broadband by 2013.