Mobile 2.0 – Just thinking aloud…
Posted by jatinmadan on May 12, 2008
Mobile Operators are still looking for new services that enhance ARPU across the nation. But there is an additional insight to it. Their main focus largely remains at customer acquisitions like Vodafone is looking forward to the new licenses that they have acquired and multiple other players that are ready to foray into the Indian telecom space.
Richard Branson of Virgin fame also made a grand appearance sometime back and claimed to do 10 firsts in the Indian telecom space. But the major statement he passed according to me was acquiring 5 million customer and to breakeven in 3 years to come.
This was a major surprise to the people in the industry where 8 million subscribers are added per month for the past quarter. Was Richard being conservative here or was he being realistic by mentioning the number of youth he is planning to acquire is yet to be seen.
Would Mobile 2.0 succeed (read – data based services) in India is a debatable question and how much of an ARPU increase it would help is largely to be seen. I belong to the opinion that active data services with comfortable bandwidth to make the user savvy and compelled to use data on mobile is still far fetched idea since even the laptop data cards provide you an access of barely 4 Kbps.
Another Challenge that I foresee is the internet penetration associated with the Indian population. With 3 % of population actively using internet services I would not expect many users to be adding on to the ARPU by using internet on the tiny mobile screen.
Jatin Madan
