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- India fastest growing GSM mart
- India’s GSM mobile firms’ revenue up 30 pct
- THE CDMA CHALLENGE
- Bharti is almost there
GSM MARKET IN INDIARegional Interest Groups - GSM India With a population of around 1.1 billion growing at roughly 1.7 per cent a year, India is potentially one of the most exciting GSM markets in the world. After two rather difficult years, the past 12 months have seen the region's promise beginning to come to fruition. Much of this success can be attributed to the stabilisation of the licensing and regulatory environment. India's telecommunications have undergone a steady liberalisation since 1994 when the Indian government first sought private investment in the sector. More significant liberalisation followed in 1996 with the licensing of new local fixed line and mobile service providers. However, it has been the government's New Telecom Policy (1999) that has had the most radical impact on the development of GSM services. 'The policy's mission statement is 'affordable communications for all', There is a genuine commitment to creating a modern and efficient communications infrastructure that takes account of the convergence of telecom, IT and media. In addition, the policy places significant emphasis on greater competition for both fixed and mobile services.' Competition in the mobile sector has already had a visible impact on prices with calls currently costing less than 9 cents per minute. This means that service costs have fallen by 60 per cent since the first GSM networks became live in 1995. It also helps explain why a recent Telecom Asia survey revealed that more than 70 per cent of Indian mobile subscribers felt that prices were now at a reasonable level. One of the challenges facing GSM operators in India is the diversity of the coverage regions -from remote rural regions to some of the most densely populated metropolitan areas in the world. India has more than 40 networks, which cover the seven largest cities, over 7000 towns and several Lacs villages. Such depth of coverage has required enormous investment from India's operators. It is estimated that more than Rs200 billion had been invested in India's GSM industry by mid-2000, a figure that is set to be supplemented by a further Rs. 300 billion over the next five years. The good news is that subscriber growth is beginning to look healthy. With India's low PC penetration and high average Internet usage -at 14-20 hours a month per user it is comparable to the US -the market for mobile data and m-commerce looks extremely promising. WAP services have already been launched in the subcontinent and the first GPRS networks are in the process of being rolled out. In the year ahead, GSM India will work with its members to realise the potential of early packet services in anticipation of the award of 3GSM licences. India fastest growing GSM martIndia is expected to have 145 million GSM (global system for mobile communications) customers by 2007-08 compared to 26 million subscribers as on March 2005, according to the Global Mobile Suppliers Association. "For GSM, India is a success story. It is one of the fastest growing markets with its subscriber base doubling in 2005. At this pace, the target of 150 million subscribers by 2007-2008 is definitely achievable," Alan Hadden, president of GSA, said at a news conference in New Delhi. Globally, the GSM market reached 1 billion users in February 2005, he said, adding GSM accounted for 80 per cent of the new subscriber growth in 2005."Almost every Latin American operator has chosen GSM. In North America GSM growth is bigger than CDMA (code division multiple access)," he said. Commenting on the raging debate over GSM versus CDMA in mobile services arena, Hadden said: "GSM is the world's most successful mobile standard with over 1 billion users, and is an open mobile standard. It also supports automatic international roaming, which is a major contributor to business plans." India’s GSM mobile firms’ revenue up 30 pctIndia’s private telecoms firms offering GSM-based mobile services reported a 24 percent rise in revenue in the year to March 2007 but said future growth rates could slow because of heavy taxes on the nascent industry. Although India’s mobile sector is the world’s fastest growing major wireless market, it is amongst the highest taxed industries in the country. Mobile carriers pay as much as 25 percent of their revenue as licence fee, spectrum charges and other taxes. The Cellular Operators Association of India (COAI) said revenue for fiscal 2003/04 stood at 83.08 billion rupees ($1.86 billion) compared with 64 billion rupees a year earlier. According to T.V. Ramachandran, director general at COAI, “These revenue growth rates cannot be maintained unless there is a concerted effort by the government to cut excessive levies and allow sharing of infrastructure” “But the potential to do much better exists as there is still huge demand in the sector.” Ramachandran said the sector was still losing money but declined to elaborate. Sales jumped because of a doubling of the GSM (Global System of Mobile Communications) user base as more people entered the flourishing market thanks to one of the lowest call rates in the world. But the monthly average revenue per user, a key measure of profitability, declined 17.4 percent to 432 rupees in the fourth quarter compared with 523 rupees in the first quarter due to a cut in tariffs and excessive competition among companies. Growth slowing, demand untapped: The association has not included the financial performance and the GSM-user base of state-run firms Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd, the second-ranked player, and Mahanagar Telephone Nigam Ltd, Ramachandran said. There are 150 million GSM customers and more than 96 million users of the rival CDMA-based mobile services in the country. The pace of growth in monthly additions is slowing after just 1.25 million users took up the service in April compared with 1.9 million in the previous month and 1.63 million in February. Ramachandran blamed the slowdown on a majority of small GSM operators being unable to expand networks into rural swathes where demand remained largely untapped. “Our surpluses are not enough to cover costs of network expansion and financing charges on loans. We are making money only to cover operating expenses,” he said. Carriers are now subsidising handset costs to woo users into the underpenetrated industry forecast to have more than 250 million customers by 2007. Roughly three percent of Indians own a mobile phone compared with about 20 percent in China. About a dozen firms such as Bharti Airtel Ltd, 28 percent owned by Singapore Telecommunications, Reliance Infocomm Ltd and the Indian GSM-unit of Vodafone group battle in the hotly competitive sector. DOES GSM HAVE THE EDGE? GSM operators are not the only ones who are worried about the rapid strides made by CDMA mobile players Reliance Infocomm and Tata Indicom in the Indian cellular market? The GSM suppliers – both handset and equipment - who incidentally also have their other foot firmly placed in the CDMA pie, are beginning to lose some sleep over what was earlier termed as `niche’ and `minuscule’ data carriage market by the operators Apart from the strong success of the two CDMA operators whose networks are based on code division multiple access (CDMA), the miserable showing of the four global standard for mobile (GSM) based networks that launched general packet radio service (GPRS) service for data connectivity in last three years, has the vendors worried. Global mobile Suppliers Association (GSA) now believes that even though India will primarily remain a voice traffic-led market in next two-three years, the data traffic component will grow by 25-30 per cent, an optimism that it’s trying to make GSM operators feel as well.
CDMA players had launched their services with CDMA 2000 1X-based networks, which can give hi-speed, always-on connectivity to the Internet, and other data services. GSM operators, on the other hand, have had to migrate from the frustrating experience of WAP (wireless application protocol) to GPRS, which has not significantly improved the subscriber’s experience of surfing the Net on/from mobile. The top brass of GSA, an organisation comprising Nokia, Siemens, Ericsson, Alcatel and Lucent Technologies - met on Tuesday in the capital to persuade the operators to adopt EDGE (Enhanced Data rates for GSM Evolution) and leave GPRS behind as a dream gone sour. Only Airtel, Vodafone, BPL Mobile and Idea Cellular had launched GPRS, but the data transfer speeds of GPRS have been abysmal. The field trials gave a speed of around 54 kbps, but the actual speeds have not exceeded 14-18 kbps, a major reason why GPRS growth has been so slow. As against the total GSM cellular base of 5.61 crore, the country has between 2,80,000 lakh GPRS users only. In comparison, the two CDMA operators have about 120 lakh connections. All these sets are data compliant. Though no figures are available as to how many use these for data services, the figure is believed to be respectable as a percentage ratio for CDMA.
At the GSM Evolution Forum held in New Delhi, GSA president Alan Hadden predicted that GSM growth will far outstrip CDMA as was happening globally. He felt India could have as many as 200 million GSM subscribers by 2007-2008, up from nine million in December 2004. According to GSA, there are over 1.1 billion GSM subscribers worldwide as against 250 million CDMA customers. The revenue of top 25 global operators from data averages 18 per cent and 22 of these operators run GSM networks. Overall, there are 76 operators in 50 countries that have committed to deploy EDGE. Almost every country has a GSM-based network and even those US operators, which operated on now-defunct TDMA technology, were migrating gradually to GSM, not CDMA, pointed out Hadden at the GSM Evolution Forum. The Forum is a global GSA program to assist the operators for evolution to third generation (3G) technologies. “People are using their phones for much more than voice. Fifteen networks have commercially launched EDGE as it can run 3G like services in the existing spectrum for the operators without needing a 3G license. Even the migration to a full-fledged 3G level of Wideband CDMA (WCDMA) will be smooth with EDGE,” said Hadden. “Besides, the automatic roaming provided by GSM networks in almost 200 countries is a power that CDMA doesn’t give you. We know for sure that almost 20-25 per cent of the revenue for some GSM operators comes from roaming customers,” he added. But CDMA is no pushover with Korea and Philippines as the shining jewels in its crown. The first CDMA 2000 1X was commercially deployed in October 2000.
Already, 81 operators have launched 77 CDMA 2000 1X networks whereas nine have launched services based on 1xEV-DO platform across Asia, the Americas and Europe. At least, 16 new 1X and six 1xEV-DO networks are scheduled to be deployed in 2004, according to CDMA Development Group. EV-DO and EV-DV are the next level of evolution on the CDMA 2000 1X platform, capable of delivering services comparable to 3G WCDMA. Where are the models? What will matter a lot in this war will be the availability of EDGE compliant handsets at affordable rates. While the two CDMA operators have been giving out handsets that can give hi-speed data transfer, same has not been the case with GSM. Even now, GPRS handsets have not become commonplace and GPRS feature is found only in mid and high-end segment handsets.
When the networks deploy EDGE, subscribers can expect the delivery of advanced mobile services such as easy downloading of video and music clips, full multimedia messaging, besides high-speed Internet and e-mail access, provided their handset supports all this. But the real cruncher will be the migration at a later stage to 3G technologies such as WCDMA, EV-DO or EV-DA as and when the government decides what to do with the 3G licences. WCDMA for example promises delivery of a phenomenal 2 megabytes per second (mbps), equivalent to what a leased line in many middle level corporates gives.
More importantly, WCDMA will spawn a whole new range of full motion audio-video applications, including video telephony. GSM lobby may continue to remain gung ho over the future of their technologies over that boosted by the American firms Qualcomm and Motorola, but Indian market could well throw an interesting scenario that industry experts will do well to watch. In the coming months, Reliance plans to offer its CDMA subscribers much more than what GSM players intend to deliver through their EDGE for their subscribers. Who succeeds in this battle for mobile customer’s eyeballs is most difficult to predict. A Korea and Japan may not be waiting to happen in India, but India will probably be more like the Chinese market with both standards co-existing. For now, GSM rules! Directory: wp-content -> uploads -> 2013 2013 -> International post doctoral research fellowship programme final report title of the research 2013 -> Seals Family History 1565 to 2004 2013 -> Rao bulletin 15 July 2013 html edition this bulletin contains the following articles 2013 -> R institute of technology school of foreign languages 2013 -> Provisional Programme – subject to change thursday 10th april 2013 -> June, 2013 National hiv testing Day Month Men’s Health Week Hurricane Safety Month 2013 -> In memory of the residents of the Parish Chesham Bois that served their country during wwii 2013 -> Federal contract awards in georgia april 2013 Download 282.18 Kb. Share with your friends:
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