India is still doing great in telecom

India is still doing great in telecom

Recent times have seen a kind of boom in telecom in India never seen before. The entry of mass players like Reliance have led to a situation where mobile has become more of a requirement than a luxury. And this trend is still continuing. India saw an addition of 1.4 crores new telephone users in the eight months from April to November 2004. The surprising part is that 88% of these connections have been mobile rather than landline.

The latest figures released by Department of Telecom also states that now the telephone density have risen to 8.37% from around 7% earlier this year. Just November saw an addition of around 19 lakh connections. The total number of connection figure as per the report is around 9.05 crores. Out of these 4.60 crores are in fact mobile phones!

The report said: “Private sector has played a major role by accounting for more than 76 per cent of the expansion during these eight months. The private sector has so far provided 4.07 crores phones as on November 30, 2004, which is 45 per cent of the total phones in the country”.

BSNL have big plans for the telecom market in the coming days. They are going to make available 25 lakh CDMA (WLL) telephones in rural areas as well as 1.5 crores GSM connections. With entry into the broadband market with as low rates of Rs. 500/- they plan to get a good user base in this market as well.