05-Oct-09 |
 With a mobile penetration of close to one in three Indians, the future of telephony in India is definitely in the mobile space. Connectivity in many parts of the country tends to be an issue, and hence the rapid growth of the mobile segment. With increasing frequency, the cell phone has become the preferred platform for value added services and even internet access. With the fixed line internet subscriber base somewhere in the region of 45 to 50 million, mobile internet connectivity is the new frontier. There has been a great upsurge in demand for the wireless internet modems offered by companies like Tata Indicom and Reliance. A number of services including payment platforms and education and content sharing platforms are being created around the use of the cell phone. Even advertising spend reflects this, with only about 3% of the total advertising budget going to internet advertising while several times that is spent on SMS advertising across the country. To draw parallels, China is today the world’s largest sender and receiver of short text messages (SMS) with the US in second place. India with its growing mobile user base could soon be challenging these two positions. The limitation in evolving content for the mobile space is essentially the mobile service provider. Since service providers want a large chunk of the revenues, profitability for content creators is an issue. What is required is an operator-independent service which can push content to a number of networks with reasonable costs, and share in the revenue as volumes grow. SMS as a technology is great for doing so, as it is network independent to the most part, and can be designed to be permission-based rather than intrusive.  The Indian telecom services market has evolved to the point where customers are comfortable paying for services in advance, primarily due to the low penetration of credit systems in India. The success of the pre-paid model in mobile telephony is testament to the fact. If a platform can be created where customers pay up in advance and then utilize the credit balance to avail a number of services, the expansion of value added services will skyrocket. Again, the kinds of services we currently can offer are fairly simple, as maybe 1% of the mobile population is using smartphones. If content based on voice and text can gain acceptance, users can then be grown to a point where they are willing to invest in a new phone to avail of the richer content a 3G or higher platform can offer them, whether it’s streaming video, internet connectivity or a host of other applications. The opportunity for content and applications in the telephone space in India is huge. However, it will require a meeting of minds between the service providers, content providers and enablers to bring it about. Source: |
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