India has one sixth of the world’s people in it, second only to China as the most populous country in the world and this week’s quarterly update from TRAI (Telecom Regulatory Authority of India) gives a feel for the very special ‘shape’ to a country which has almost no fixed telephone lines and as yet no 3G licenses allocated.
While IPTV has been touted India by both Microsoft and its customer, Reliance Communications, since 2007, something that we never took seriously at the time, given that there were only about 4 million broadband customers her back then. Today it is even more clear that IPTV and India are not set to mix, with fixed line Internet users reaching just 13.54 million, out of 37 million wired telephone lines, while just 6.22 million of those are broadband lines (the rest are dial up), which can carry over 256 Kbps and that’s a 12% increase from the previous quarter, which is considerable, but doesn’t dent wireless usage.
Compare that to the 117.82 million wireless Internet subscribers who have experienced the internet only on a mobile phone, and at that only on a system which has GSM or first generation CDMA, as there is no 3G yet in India.
India has some 78 million cable TV homes, but these are mostly delivered on analog lines, despite TRAI a year ago promising funding and to regulate the thousands of cable operators into multiple tiers and to use the Universal Service Obligation Fund, which skims 5% of telecoms revenues across the country, plus additional voted government spending and use it to upgrade cable.
Instead it is the DTH suppliers that are taking off, with the national TV broadcaster Doordashan offering a free to air satellite service and 6 competing pay TV systems ‘ one of them yet to be fully rolled out, accounting for 13.09 million customers by the end of March 2009.
A year ago out of 225 million Indian households, only 128 million had any kind of TV, with 60% using cable and 3.2 million subscribing to DTH. Overnight India has added 10 million DTH customers and there is room to add another 100 million homes over the coming years.
The revolution in cable is the only chance that India has for widespread broadband wired internet deployment, but it looks like very little has happened here since TRAI made those recommendations for changes in cable regulation.
The Indian cable TV industry has had two decades of unfettered entrepreneurial growth, to become a mish-mash of different service levels, weak programming, non-uniform pricing and is made up of as many as 60,000 separate companies, each with an average of just over 1,000 customers.
TRAI wanted to make it so that new licensees will be obligated to build out an entirely digital infrastructure within 3 years, including Cable Modem Termination Systems with which they can all offer high speed internet lines, using DOCSIS equipment.
But given the rate of uptake in DTH, it looks like this is rapidly becoming the standard way for entertainment to reach Indian homes, along with free to air terrestrial, and its limited reach.
When we first started taking a keen interest in India a few years ago it had only 119 million cellphone user, and was growing at around 35% per annum. Today it boasts 391 million mobile subscribers and this quarter added 44.87 million new subscribers.
India still has public phones boxes, called Public Call Offices (PCOs) and they have actually increased this quarter from 5.98 million to 6.20 million, and are still many people’s only way of communicating electronically showing why there is such an aggressive drift to mobile.