The new year round the corner will be a defining one for telephony in India;
the beginning of the second part of our mobile odyssey. Five snapshots:
A half-billion mobiles: India will cross 500 million subscribers in this
financial by March 31.
Finally, 3G! So what if it's over 10 years old and long in the tooth; or if
the world has moved on to 3.5G and is testing 4G? If the 3G auction happens by
December, we should see 3G services from Airtel, Vodafone and others, by March
2010.
You can use 3G today for data-with cards from Reliance and Tata Indicom-and
for voice, with BSNL and MNTL (but there are few takers for the 3G services of
these two government-protected monopolies). In 2010, the 3G spectrum will also
be used heavily for voice, to free up the really-crowded 2G space.
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| prasanto kumar roy |
Much of last week I was entirely on 3.5G in Singapore, with blazing speeds.
That's the high-speed downlink packet access (HSDPA), which is what takes it up
to speeds ahead of 3G.
Mobile Number Portability: MNP should be in place as we enter the new year.
So you can change your mobile service provider while retaining the same number.
I don't know the level of churn this will cause-given that if one telco has a
service quality issue, the other has billing problems-but MNP will force telcos
to improve their quality of service and billing.
Data and multimedia apps: We'll see data taking off: maps, location software
like Google's Latitude, clients for mail, social networking, video, and, of
course, voice over IP. The latter will help commoditize voice further, also
pushing down the cost of regular long-distance calls on the mobile-and therefore
on landlines too.
The Smartphone: Of the eight to ten million phones selling in India each
month, at least every tenth one is a smartphone: internet and apps capable, with
a memory card. Smartphone sales grew nearly 80% last year, and will grow more.
As prices drop, every fifth phone sold will be a smartphone in 2010.
All this means that the mobile phone will really become the universal,
personal connectivity, information and entertainment hub that it has long
promised to be–for nearly half of India's billion-plus people.
(pkr@cybermedia.co.in)