NEW DELHI, INDIA: The number of real, active mobile users in India has just crossed 500 million, according to a analysis of statistics released by telecom regulator TRAI along with industry data and inputs. This is much lower than the 811.59 million that is projected as the official number of mobile subscribers in March 2011, says a study.
According to Voice&Data, the Indian telecom Industry journal from South Asia’s largest specialty publisher, CyberMedia, the actual numbers are much below this projection. The study is based on the April 6 release of TRAI, which gave details about the cellphone connections in the country in February 2011.
A footnote tells the actual story
Voice&Data said a footnote in the April 6 release provides the first caveat: “Active wireless subscribers in VLR in February 2011 are 563 million”, pointing to the fact that the actual number of mobile users in India is below the 810 million or even the 791 million mark.
The VLR, or Visitor Location Register, is a database of the subscribers who have roamed into the jurisdiction of the mobile switching center (MSC) which it serves. Each base station in the network is served by only one VLR, hence a subscriber cannot be present in more than one VLR at a time.
So 563 million VLR in February means that the remaining 228 million subscribers, are inactive: users (mostly prepaid ones) who have not recharged their SIMs for a long time and are in the "grace period" before disconnection. This grace period can vary significantly, sometime stretching into months or a year, even though such users are unlikely to renew and recharge.
The second major caveat is that these are subscriptions, not subscribers. If a person has two SIM cards, he will show up as two subscribers in the TRAI data. The details of this study are being published in the forthcoming issue of Voice&Data and will be available online on voicendata.com.
The study also quotes former CMD of BSNL Kuldeep Goyal as saying “Obviously, 800 million subscriptions does not mean 800 million users, actual number of active users would be in the 450-500 million range.”
Multiple SIM ownership a major trend in India
Voice&Data said there is no firm data on multiple SIM ownership, a very major trend in India, going by the large number of dual and triple SIM handsets sold.
According to conservative industry estimates multiple-SIM ownership is at least 15 per cent to 30 per cent of total SIMs. That is, if you randomly pick 100 mobile users in India, they will own 115 to 130 active SIMs among them. Other industry sources say this figure is too conservative, and multi-SIM ownership is well above 30 per cent.
“Bundling of SIM cards with mobile handsets at an entry price starting from Rs. 500 and upwards, and the ‘affordable lifetime connection’ plans caused a surge in new mobile connections,” says Naveen Mishra, Lead India Telecoms Analyst at CyberMedia Research.
Supporting the Voice&Data argument further, he adds. “More than a third of handsets sold in the country during the quarter ended December 31, 2010 was a dual- or triple-SIM slot phone, as compared to less than 1 in hundred multi-SIM mobile phone sales in the quarter ended March 31 2009.”
Real wireless tele-density at 41 p.c., not 66 p.c.
For this estimation, Voice&Data's editors simply did the following to arrive at the figure of 501 million users:
• Take the figure of 810 million for March 31 (projected from TRAI data of February 2011)
• Remove inactive/grace period subscriptions to arrive at the active VLR subscriber figure of 576 million (projected from the TRAI data of February 2011)
• Divide 576 million by 1.15 (at least 15 per cent have multiple SIMs) to reflect a conservative estimate of 501 million users.
For a population of 1,210 million people, this translates into a real wireless tele-density of 41 per cent, and not 66 per cent.
Uptapped market over over 700 million
Says Voice&Data Chief Editor Prasanto K Roy: “If you want to compute the real tele-density, to know how many real people own a mobile phone in India, you have to exclude inactive subscriptions and multi-SIM ownership. That leaves 501 million actual phone users. The assumptions we have made are conservative. The real picture could be more stark.”
However, this huge inaccuracy has a strong silver lining, says the study.
“This does mean that the addressable market for handset makers and operators alike is bigger than most people thought – over 200 million bigger. It means over 700 million people do not yet have mobile phones or subscriptions, and that makes this the biggest market in the world for the decade ahead,” Roy added.
So the potential of Indian telecom market increases even further in light of the actual mobile subscriber base.
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