Fifth Take On Indian Telecom Industry Current Scenarios & The Falling ARPU

Another botheration coming to Indian operators is falling ARPU rather it’s not only the constraint in Indian market but if we take Asia – pacific as a whole ARPU is falling in all Asia pacific countries, down the line when Telecom Talk tracked to figure out amongst the root causes for falling ARPU the thing which contributed the most was “New SIM connections available previously with life time validity”  that was the time of on going price war when every newbie and then incumbent operator started giving new connection at a marginal cost of around Rs.50 or so and that too with lifetime validity and in this phase customers bought many new connection just to enjoy the low tariff plans given by other operators because buying a new SIM customer got to pay less price and also such schemes were not available with their current operators, many other examples came like “People buying additional new Prepaid SIM’s from one operator or another for less tariff and kept their Postpaid no as it is because that was being used from past many years”  But as if now when every operator is counting per second this situation has become bit steady as almost same tariff plans are with every operators.

Now the result of above mentioned new SIM’s purchased with lifetime validity  resulted in increasing new connections with the users, but there contribution in terms or revenue paid remained the same for eg: if an ideal user was contributing Rs. 600 per month with one operator now he was contributing the same Rs. 600 but either with 2 or 3 operators and also those SIM which were partially-active kept residing with customer but not contributing in operators revenue and that too with life time validity thus no chance of getting it expired in next 3-4 years also, and if you remember the days when falling ARPU was not as much a constraint as now, every new connection was costing about Rs.300-500 and that too use to expire within 3months from the day it was left inactive. Thus buying of new connection in recent phases a customer resulted in increase of divisors (new connections) but its dividend (Revenue paid) remained almost the same and in this scenario falling of ARPU was obvious.

Monotonous!!!!!!! Ok now if we shift our drift then we realize that in the foray of price war 3G again was not the talk of the town for so many days as extending the dates after dates in India its story has almost become the same of “The Lion and shepherd” that we used u study in childhood days now Indian customers are also not set to believe that will the auction happen on this next proposed date or not. But to tell all of our readers if now the auction happens on the proposed date too than also it will take another an year or so when it will be LIVE for an ideal customer to use it because the Infra is quite high and 3G require different essentials than 2G which will again take time to roll out so be patient,  but mostly operators are eying on 3G and 3G-VAS as par as increase in ARPU is concerned.

All our Telecom talk readers are welcome to share their views on the above and foray to healthy discussions.