With the Reliance juggernaut throwing its hat, the battle to have a pie in India's lucrative telecommunications market has just got intensified. The ongoing price war has seen tariff rates tumble down even below the price of a post card! This holds a promise for the country where teledensity is way behind the world average. Enter the mobile wars.
The
above words aptly summarize the state of the telecom
industry in India. Though it is true that economic
liberalization has brought in a sea change in India's
telecom landscape in terms of reach and technological
advancement, the fact remains that a wide section of
society, especially the rural areas, remain
unconnected. That remains a cause of great concern. A
totally contrasting picture is seen in the case of
China. Robert Clark, telecom industry expert and
Editor, Wireless Asia, Hong Kong opines "There is no good reason why China should have 21
times as many cellular customers as India." True.
India fares poorly when compared to China even on the
basic telecom services front. Why is it so? The
regulations here are in shambles, to say the least.
That in turn could be attributed to a distributed
regulatory regime, which leaves enough leeway for
telecom operators to exploit.
As
a consequence, the industry has been mired in
controversies one after another for sometime now, with
litigations piling up. First, it was the issue of
exorbitant license fees for cellular services firms,
and now it is facing the impasse over the issue of
limited mobility which has seen the industry getting
divided into two rival groups, one the pro-cellular
and another the pro-WiLL (Wireless in Local Loop).
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