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Changeover

India will soon have more cellphones than land lines. How soon? Read On.

By Vandana Gombar

Not a universal boom

For Indian telecom, May 2003 will remain a not-to-forget month. This is the month in which three big developments took place.

One, all incoming calls on mobile phones became free, as the industry entered the 'calling party pays' (CPP) era. Two, the regulator finally fixed and implemented the terms on which telecom networks talk to one another ('interconnection'). And three, Chandigarh, became the first Indian city with a mobile phone population exceeding the fixed-line telephones.

That Chandigarh should score this first would surprise many technology-watchers, but perhaps not those who see poetic justice in it, mobility being another form of freedom from fixations. Chandigarh, after all, also claims to be India's first 'post-modern city' (in a statue-free sense, that is, the very logic that prevents one from calling it Jawaharlal Nehru's, Le Corbusier's or Sabeer Bhatia's city).

Delhi is likely to be next, with mobile phones overtaking the old kind. And what about the rest of the country?

On current projections, the rest of the country would have to wait till 2008 for the scales to tilt in favour of mobile telephony. Yes, the country did add over 800,000 phone subscribers in May, to take the total to over 14 million, but there is no revising the D-Date, says T.V. Ramachandran, secretary general, Cellular Operators Association of india (COAI).

That's a good five years away, and it would make India the last market in the Asia-Pacific region to switch over (in the manner as defined), as per a recent study of 13 markets in the region by Gartner. The other 12 markets are China, Australia, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Philippines, Japan, Malaysia, New Zealand, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan and Thailand. Some 10 of these markets already had more cellular subscribers than fixed line users by end-2001.

"By the end of 2006, the only country that will have more fixed-line subscribers than cellular users is India," says the report. Well, slow change is better than no change at all.

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