The Indian Telecom Market

According to this NY Times Article Qualcomm expects 6 million Indian users to move to CDMA based mobile phones. This in my opinion is just the tip of the ice-berg. With a population touching almost one billion and with a majority of the country still largely un-connected by traditional land lines, there is a huge market out there.

There two important factors to be considered though:

• Price
• & Technology (or rather lack of it)

If mobile phones become affordable (can we get it under $25?) I don't see why people will not start using them- unless of course, they are difficult to use.

So I think the first step would be to invest some money in designing simpler to use mobile phones. This might bring down manufacturing costs too, as you can do away with features like games, calendar and even the phone book. People who can hardly read will probably never use a phone book...

Did I say hardly read? Yes, a majority of Indians are still illiterate, and more over even if they were able read their own language, you have to take into account that India is a country of many languages... So one may even have to think up of an interface with little or no text and keeps the feature list down to 2 -- a) Make calls b) Receive calls...

There, with those two things done there is a huge huge market. It might just about be the biggest thing in the telecom revolution since the invention of the telephone...

Posted by Navneet at May 25, 2003 07:35 PM | TrackBack | Comments disabled due to spam