A more 'connected' India

NEW DELHI:India will meet its target of increasing the number of phones to seven for every 100 people much ahead of its scheduled date thanks to rockbottom call rates, the industry regulator said.

The government had set a target of raising the number of phones -- both landline and wireless -- to seven per 100 people by 2005 and 15 by 2010, up from about two in 1999.

But the near doubling of the mobile user base to more than 27 million customers in the past seven months has already pushed the number of phones to more than six in 100 people.

"I hope by the end of this month we will cross a teledensity of seven," Pradip Baijal, chairman of the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India, told a seminar.

"I'm quite positive in 2005 or 2006 we'll cross 15. We are hopeful that we'll cross 100 million users by 2005."

Though demand is flourishing in India, the country's expected mobile user base in 2005 will still be just 40 percent of what China, the world's largest wireless market, is today.

Baijal said aggressive competition in the nine-year-old wireless sector had caused a sharp fall in call rates which are down to about two U.S. cents a minute from a high of nearly 37 cents when mobile services were launched in 1994.

The sector has moved to a single licence system which allows firms to offer both cellular and basic services under a unified permit. The move is expected to fuel growth in the industry which is open to unlimited competition.

More than a dozen private and state-run companies are competing with each other in the domestic telecoms sector.

© Reuters