3G in India

I have my serious doubts about success of 3G in India. I have certain points which i think support my view.

3G is a content driven technology and apparantly it will be used as a technology to provide more services and content to existing subscribers and not as a technology to attract more subscribers. Earlier it has been employed in countries like UK where the penetration with 2G technologies was already 75% and today with 3G they have 80% penetration. In such a country also the operators found it tough to work with 3G and they boast of 99% literacy. I believe data services would be taken up only by literate.

India is a country with hardly 20% Mobile penetration (considering how many people mobile reaches to). Many users will still be new users. How can I as an operator even dream of convincing a person to buy a 40,000 handset to use data services when he has not handled any mobile phone earlier??

An operator cant even dream of earning revenues from voice services in 3G as the cost of call has gone to less than 1 Rupee Now and has reached Re 1 for STD calls.. No user is gonna buy 3G if the voice call costs exceeds more than 20%.. Operator has to generate cost out of data only..but if people dont use data I seriously doubt in how many years can an operator get his crores and crores of 3G investment back.

I believe India is more fit for 4G because by then we would have a much much more advanced and mature audience. We should concentrate on our 2G and 2.5G services and I think with EDGE being able to give stable speeds of 150-200 kbps is enough for current situation. Moreover The additional spectrum which the government is planning for 3G operations can be given to existing players for EDGE and CDMA2000 1XRTT which would provide more data speeds in both GSM and CDMA World.

Please post your views regarding the same and if possible get in touch with me thru email

By: Nikhlesh Agrawal