Mobile Subscribers Rise By 9 Million (almost) In June.. While Total Broadband Subscribers Only 4.38 Million!
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Well if the latest TRAI (Telecom Regulatory Authority of India) Â data is anything to go by than the monthly mobile subscribers are more than double of the countries total broadband subscribers! Well if there was any doubt left that mobile might just be the medium to reach out to an ever growing audience as compared to the internet these numbers are sure to clear your doubts away!
Check the stats for both the mobile subscribers growth and the broadband growth below for years 07 and 08.
If the above numbers are any indication to go by it will be long before we reach the promised 100 million broadband subscribers promised by TRAI. Infact last year Pramod Haque of norwest venture partners stated that in India “Mobile Internet will be bigger than broadband“
And given then above statistics almost a year later I think Pramod Haque was bang on in calling that trend. Though according to this times of india article users that have accessed internet through their mobile has crossed 38 million! Now not sure if this includes stuff like VAS downloads which would mean every ringtone or caller back tone download through gprs is taken as a user connected to the internet through mobile.
On the whole the majority of phones in India do not offer good browsing experience and its only now that iPhone will be launching officially in India. Though the overall mobile subscriber numbers hit the roof with 300 million being crossed in the next couple of months itself It will be safe to say that we are atleast 2 years away from a mobile internet revolution and the combined impact of mobile internet + broadband penetration (hopefully it reaches atleast half of the aimed 20 million by 2010) would create a boom impact for the internet and mobile businesses in India.
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Good article Rajiv. Makes me ponder, will all the websites give a knee jerk reaction when we face a mobile internet population explosion ? or should we start creating wap pages for our websites right now?
Well by the time that explosion does happen most mobiles will have browsers that make normal web viewing possible (that itself would be part ofthe reason for greater adoption). So the point of creating wap sites or .mobi sites wouldn’t arise.
wap is definitely out of the picture…
.mobi still might work out because it is backed by all the biggies… but the point is that mobile and pc are fast losing the line of distinction when it come to accessing the web… and you won’t have to have mobile specific stuff ..you will just need web specific stuff which can be accessed through a mobile or a pc …
the difference would come to VAS for mobile… that is where the impact of this number will be felt