Impact of declining data services and Mobile Internet rates in India?
10 Aug 2010 Leave a Comment
in Mobile Internet Tags: Mobile Internet in India, Mobile Internet usage in India, Telco rates for Mobile Internet
Telco in India today, are making lot of attempt to reduce the Mobile Internet and data service charges for Subscribers. Reasons – As per recent statistics (IAMAI) only 27 percent of consumers have access to Mobile Internet, which accounts to 127 Million. Of this only 12 million have used Mobile Internet. The number of active users of Mobile Internet is only two million. At present the voice service domaintes the data services. Data services account to ~5% of the revenues for telecom operators. Obviously, Telcos goal is towards attracting more users.
Methods adopted to attract more users
Operators are working on more attractive packages. Competitive data services packages offered by various Indian telcos such as Airtel, Videocon, Reliance for their GSM subscribers stand at Rs.96- Rs.99 per month with unlimited Internet browsing. Social networking seems to be very popular services used by many today. Keeping this in mind, Airtel also provided free surfing of social networking sites Facebook on the mobile to all their subscribers for two months. The idea was to attract more ‘new users’. Many are also coming up with plans for younger consumers as they play a major role in Mobile Internet consumption.
Role of 3G in Mobile Internet usage
Experts feel, after all Operators in India are 3G network ready, there will be increase in demand for data services making it beneficial for both operators (increased revenues) as well as the users (faster data rate). Mobile Internet usage seems to be the key to success of 3G in India.
Scope for improvement
According to me, there seem to be, great opportunity for operators to grow in this space, however it depends on the ways in which operators attract the users. Some of the ways to improve are:
- Provide more user friendly browsers (better graphics)
- Reduce the tarrif rates with exciting offers every now and then
- Newer phones to come up with larger screen sizes at low cost
- Uninterupped connectivity with faster speed of data services
- Better marketing campaigns for awareness among Mobile subscribers
We still need to wait and watch how much role will 3G play in attracting more Mobile Internet users.
- Kavyanidhi Narayan
