RapidShare Comes To India

Broadband penetration in many countries has been growing at an exponential rate over the last five years. The bandwidth available to mobile devices has grown as well. This is especially interesting as India has about 400 million mobile subscribers, and the highest growth rate in wireless subscribers in the world.

Keeping in mind the phenomenal growth broadband and internet penetration has had in India in recent years, RapidShare AG, a file hosting company is also making inroads into this lucrative market. RapidShare recently conducted a survey on the perception of internet and the results show that for more than 70% of the participants, communication over the internet is important or very important for the quality of their life. 67% would not miss the information they get from the net and 43% perceive social networks as a crucial part of their life.

RapidShare’s users primarily consist of private users and businesses. RapidShare’s service is free and no registration is necessary. The link to files is exclusively sent to the uploader and the service is
secure since links cannot be guessed as there is no search function. Frequent users sign up for a premium account and are able to enjoy priority bandwidth.

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RapidShare’s global COO, Bobby Chang on his first visit to India was there to grace the occasion. When quizzed about how businesses and SMBs can exploit the hosting services of RapidShare, he replied, “Businesses use RapidShare’s premium services extensively. Especially small and medium sized companies like graphic designers, media houses, publishers, software developing companies, draftsmen, lawyers, marketing agencies etc. use RapidShare to transfer big files fast, easy and secure.”

Chang adds, “India has a great potential for internet usage. The internet penetration in India is increasing every year and there is scope for growth of communication and hosting data online. We have extended our internet connectivity from about 80 Gigabits per second in 2006 to more than 400 Gigabits today. Our users can get their own webspace with a capacity of 500 GB and can download up to 150 GB data every month."

One of the issues which has plagued several file hosting companies, including RapidShare is hosting of copyrighted files. With the conviction of four individuals in April 2009 in the famed Pirate bay trial, file hosting companies have all the more reasons to feel unsettled. Chang clarifies his company’s stand, “RapidShare AG has not and will not promote copyright infrigement and will stand by with the interests of the copyright holders. At the backend, we have a dedicated report abuse team which removes copyrighted data within 7 days of any report abuse activity.”