While all other industry sectors are facing the effects of the global financial turmoil, India’s telecom sector is green as ever. The total GSM mobile users at the end of October was at around 242 million with October alone having a record subscriber addition of 8 million. It broke the previous best of 7.7 million that was witnessed in September. The Cellular Operators Association of India (COAI) has anticipated that the GSM base would cross the 250 million mark by December.

The biggest gainer as usual was Bharti Airtel with 2.7 million new subscribers taking its total user base to past 80 million. Vodafone Essar added more than 2 million new users and accounted a total of 56 million subscribers. State owned BSNL managed to get 6.7 lakh new users, taking its total count to 39.8 million.

With the date for the 3G bids set, it’s time to get some clarity on the revenue aspect. Apart from spending big money to bid for the 3G spectrum, Indian telcos will have to shell out more if they secure the spectrum.

DoT has made it clear that a certain percentage will be charged to operators using 3G airwaves. They have also added that a current player in the market will have share 1% percent more as compared to 3% for the newest entrants.

However, this move has not been conceived well by most of the existing telcos. A two percent discount for old telcos comes because they already share around 2-6% of their revenues for offering 2G services and with an extra percent means now they’ll have to share anything in between 3-7%. Companies want an incremental share of revenues for using 3G services because 3G would be used by a niche crowd and a direct percent sharing means more money to the government even if the operator hasn’t used much of the 3G airwaves.

Source: ET

There has been a lot of things happening within the telecom department regarding the 3G technology. A few weeks back a rumor revealed that the Department of Telecommunication (DoT) has pushed the 3G auction by two weeks to January 15. Then some days later, we heard about the telecom ministry playing hardball by keeping the auction as per previous schedule.

Now in a recent twist, Telecom secretary Siddhartha Behura announced in a press conference that they would be conducting the 3G auction sometime in the second week of January and would be allocating spectrum by the end of month. He also said that come what may, there would be no delay in the plan to complete the auction by mid-January.

Let us hope the government sticks to their word this time because more delay could mean delay in the cash reserves for the government.

Mobile number portability (MNP) when implemented will prove a boon to users who want to change the service provider without losing their number. However, a study conducted by a research firm Strategy Analytics has something different to say which vaguely forecasts MNP a complete dud in India.

Their survey results claim that almost 90 percent of subscribers prefer to stay with their current provider and are content with their services.

In the last 12 months 81 per cent of the users have not changed their operators and 89 per cent of the users are not going to switch between operators in the next 12 months.

We Say: This is a positive statistic as far as service providers are concerned. But we doubt the percentage to remain constant at this level after MNP is introduced. Maybe the subscribers are actually waiting for MNP to come into effect before taking the plunge. Or the operators are tightening their belts to offer good service so that their subscriber base doesn’t deflate. Nonetheless, it is we, the consumers are benefitting from this. Aren’t we?

Source

TRAI has released the official subscriber figures for the month of August which makes the wireless subscriber count to pass the 300 million mark. This feat was possible because of the 9.16 million wireless subscribers which were added during the month.

Every player managed add an adequate number of subscribers but Bharti Airtel managed to cram up more than 2 million subscribers which makes it the leader of the wireless segment.

It seems the Blackberry security controversy in India will finally come to an end. Department of Telecommunication (DoT), Intelligence Bureau and National Technical Research Organisation (NTRO) have claimed to crack the Blackberry encryption codes which helps them to track the data sent from a Blackberry device to a non Blackberry device. The government has successfully tested this on operators like Airtel, Vodafone, BPL Mobile and Reliance barring the newest entrant Tata Indicom.

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Nokia has been expanding from its handset manufacturing niche to a new media agency for advertising on mobile phone applications and websites. In other words, the network will offer advertising on the mobile internet and innovative ad units within mobile applications. For this initiative, Nokia has roped in a deal with Airtel to show ads in India. This means we can see ads showing up on Airtel’s Live page or even be promoted to download free Nokia apps like Mosh, Widsets and so on.

The success rate totally depends on the number of mobile internet users but Nokia is optimistic of getting a high clickthrough rate (CTR) of 10%.

Nokia Advertising

Being owned by the government has its own advantages. MTNL and BSNL have been already allotted the 3G spectrum and if all the trial tests prove successful, MTNL will be launching its commercial services by December. The current trial network is in and around the Delhi’s Connaught Place area. Mumbaikars will be getting their hands on the 3G pie by early next year.

DoT recently allocated one block of spectrum each to MTNL in Delhi and Mumbai and to BSNL in other service areas. This has been done ahead of the forthcoming auction of 3G spectrum for each telecom service area. DoT has already initiated the process for selection of the specialised agency for conduct of the e-auction. MTNL and BSNL will pay a price for the spectrum allocated to them equal to the highest bid in the respective service area.

Tata Teleservices Maharashtra Ltd (TTML), one of the youngest and fastest growing telecom service providers in India announced on Monday that it has crossed the 6 million subscribers milestone in the Mumbai, Maharashtra and Goa circles.

Tata Indicom was recently certified as the only operator with zero congested points for interconnection between other operators. Tata Indicom claims that it is keeping pace with the rapid subscriber growth in Mumbai, Maharashtra and Goa and it is making substantial progress in upgrading its networks to 3G capability and building a congestion-free network.

We say:We at Tele Gyaan, agree that Tata Indicom is building up a congestion-free network – as certified by TRAI. But one thing we do not agree with is that Tata Indicom is trying to keep pace with the growing telecom market. The common complain cited by our Tata Indicom readers are that despite of giving low tariffs and good number of benefits, they totally lack in their phone selling portfolio. So you know now Tata, where you have to put your pennies on.

3G services are still to go commercial and we are getting predictions about the subscriber base of this next generation wireless service. Research agency Strategy Analytics has predicted that India could be the largest 3G market among emerging countries with 270 million subscribers within the next 5 years.

They even said that 3G subscribers would constitute more than one third of the total wireless users in India. The subscribers would initially come from metro and ‘A’ category cities, and enterprises and business customers would make the largest chunk of it followed by tech-savvy young generation who would drive this market.

PTI