According to a white paper named ‘India 2020: Bringing the networked society to life’ released by Ericsson, the overall revenue of Indian telecom operators is expected to grow from $28 billion in 2013 to $46-49 billion by 2020. The mobile broadband subscriber base in India would grow from 100 million in 2013 to 600 million by 2020. Further, around 20 per cent of them would use 4G services by 2020.
CAG has said that despite DoT's technical committee specifying that spectrum up to 6.2 MHz was sufficient to support a subscriber base of 9 lakh in Delhi and Mumbai, the telecom department decided to allot additional 1.8 MHz airwaves to Bharti Airtel and Vodafone India after they clocked 4 lakh subscribers. However, neither the Telecom Commission, the highest decision-making body in DoT, nor the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) were consulted before the department took a final decision.
DoT didn't consider efficiency, effectiveness and scarcity of bandwidth of 900 MHz spectrum in fixing revenue share. These operators, however, charged more from their rivals while allowing roaming on the lower frequency band compared to the 1800 MHz band, the auditor said. Consequently, the government lost close to Rs. 6,000 crore by not charging more for the more efficient frequency band.
The share of data revenues in total revenues of the telecom operators will rise from 10-12 per cent in 2013 to 35-40 per cent in 2020. However, the revenues from SMS and other traditional services would remain stable at $2 billion during 2013-2020. Also, the prices of smartphones will fall by 40-50 per cent over the next three years. As a result, the number of subscribers who are able to afford smartphones and services would increase from 110 million in 2013 to reach over 700 million by 2020.
Ericsson is of the view that to fulfill the Digital India initiative, telecom operators should be able to access more spectrum from the government, and work to build new network capabilities and revenue models.
www.urssystems.com
0 comments:
Post a Comment