Should ARPU and MOU be Considered Alone For Evaluating Telco's Profitability?

[ravi_patent 28]

FE has a story on ARPU and MOU of 4 majors of indian telecom

http://www.financialexpress.com/news/vodafone-idea-pip-rcom-in-usage-chart/807391/0

however i was wondering if ARPU and MOU can be considered separately for evaluating telco's profitability.

true gsm biggies have higher ARPU& MOU.but average airtel customer shells out 202rs/ month after using 458minutes/month.while Rcom customer shells out 117rs/m with only 93minutes of usage.

who is least profitable then?

[shrik 9]

In the Indian scenario where a lot of users have multiple mobile connections, I wonder if any per-user metric makes sense. Maybe globally it does, because most subscribers there are postpaid and expenses related to bill generation, dispatch, collection etc scale with number of users. But in India where prepaid dominates, this is not very relevant. In my opinion, to better compare telcos, one should give the user number lesser importance and instead look at numbers like total minutes of usage, revenue per minute, minutes per base station, etc.

[Karthik R 246]

Interesting - I was under the impression that Rcom's users are typically high voice volume generators (that should explain the lower than the herd tariff and famed unlimited call packs) and here they are scoring way down below Vodafone and Idea..