A Phone In Every Hand, Almost

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DELHI: Like every household in Delhi has a wall clock and two or three wrist watches, depending upon the number of members of the family, the day is not far when every family will have a fixed telephone line and two or three mobile phones. Delhi currently has a teledensity of 65 and key players are bright-eyed and bushy-tailed to take it to 90 by 2008.

“Tremendous growth is being witnessed in cellular phone penetration. Bharti Cellular, Hutchison Essar, MTNL and Idea along with CDMA operators like Reliance Infocomm, and Tata Teleservices are the key players. Keeping in view the recent growth rate in mobile teledensity of 25, Delhi will cross a teledensity of 80 by the end of year 2007,” says TV Ramachandran, director general, COAI.

The concept of prepaid connection has become quite popular with a large chunk of Delhiites. Amid intense competition prevailing in the prepaid market, all players are trying their best to woo the customers.

Today, a person can go mobile by coughing up just Rs 179 for a Reliance prepaid phone. People call the plumber on his cell phone to fix their leaking tap. Even scrap dealers get a call on the phone unlike earlier when one stood in the balcony and waited to chance upon them.

Fixed wireline and fixed wireless operaters account for 20% of the current teledensity. Bharti, Reliance, Tata Indicom and MTNL are the crucial players. “After the government relaxed policies on telecom regulation a few years ago, MTNL and Idea started sharing the market with the then bigwigs — Hutch and Airtel. Allowing unified access licence and CDMA in November 2003 have also been major leg-ups in competition and have also made mobile handsets affordable,” says SC Khanna, secretary general, ABTO.

Maximum cellphone penetration in Delhi has been witnessed among the city’s youth (between 18-22 years), which constitutes 40% of the total population. Along with the voice, non-voice utilities are also riding high among the youth. Downloading ringtones, caller tunes, songs from internet, sending messages through MMS and SMS, account for about 9% of the service providers’ revenues.

According to Khannna, the telecom industry will register a manifold increase in its subscriber base if service providers get their act together in effecting a change in government’s perceived apathy towards bringing down the current tax rate of 30% in the telecom sector. Any positive development from the government will certainly add glory to the telecom industry’s accomplishments.