As the total mobile subscriber base in India touched 752.19 million (or 75.22 crore) at the end of December 2010, it was touted that the figure was far greater than the planners and telecom pundits had anticipated two years ago.
There is no doubt that the mobile telephony market is booming, but be ready for a shocking news: in reality the number of active mobile users are far less. To be precise, only 70 per cent or 529 million of the total subscribers were active subscribers and 223 million or 30 per cent were just holding SIM cards without using them. This was revealed in a recent report by Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai), regulatory body for the telecom industry.
Why such a huge discrepancy? Well, with 21 mobile companies in the fray in 23 telecom circles in the country, in some circles like Karnataka there are 12 companies vying with each other, telecom companies are giving away SIM cards for free. Some are even bundling free talk/ data time with free SIM cards. Then there are all sorts of tariff schemes like ‘one paisa per second’ and ‘half-a-paisa per second’, etc, that lured people to acquire SIM cards of a variety of service operators leading to a huge number of duplicate SIMs.
As per Trai norm, all mobile service operators supply subscribers data from their VLR or Visitor Location Register where information on active subscribers are captured on the last working day of the month (Monday to Friday).
Old operators better off
The operator-wise data also reveals another interesting fact that old players enjoy a much better VLR ratio than the new ones.
Country’s largest mobile service operator, Bharti Airtel, for example have 92 per cent of the subscribers as active. It is followed by Idea (90 per cent), Vodafone (76 per cent), RCom -CDMA (68 per cent), RCom-GSM (66 per cent), Aircel (60 per cent) and BSNL-GSM (57 per cent). Commenting on Trai data Bharti Airtel CEO Karnataka Circle Venkatesh V said “Many of our subscribers do fall prey for new schemes of new operators. But they soon return to Airtel which offers best network at most competitive tariffs. This is the reason why our number of inactive subscribers is so low.”
Large number of subscribers who fell for all types of gimmicks by the new operators seems to have quickly deserted them.
Uninor, according to Trai data, has 55 per cent inactive subscribers, Systema (MTS) has 50 per cent, Tata Docomo 50 per cent, Loop 46 per cent and the worst is 64 per cent inactive subscribers on the government-owned MTNL which operates only in Mumbai and Delhi.
Only the mobile telephony industry is to be blamed for the problem of duplicate SIMs.
As 95 per cent of the mobile subscribers are in prepaid schemes, they keep changing SIMs lured by unrealistically low tariff rates offered by new players. But poor service and weak network make them go back to the operators who have been around for long have invested heavily in technology and network, pointed out Venkatesh.
