Andrew Bonwick
Vice President of Product Development at Relm Insurance
Madhav Sheth
CEO of Ai+ Smartphone
Stephen Rose
CEO Render Networks


The Indian telecom sector has a lot of room for growth in the consumer business. Telcos are focused on increasing the prices of mobile plans to improve their ARPU (average revenue per user). But it is not the only way telcos will notice ARPU improvement in wireless mobile services. Many consumers will increase their data consumption as digitisation gets a push, resulting in more recharges in a quarter. Then users will be paying extra for consuming 5G services and OTT (over-the-top) bundled prepaid packs. But one way through which the telcos can see their ARPU go upwards is by converting 2G customers to 4G/5G.
Read More – 4 Billion People Access Mobile Internet through a Smartphone
2G Still a Big Part of India
2G is still very much a big part of India. Despite the high availability of 4G and 5G in the country, millions of customers still use 2G. There are about 250 million 2G customers in India still. There could be many reasons for this. One is that many users still consume mobile internet through a feature phone that supports legacy networks. While there are 4G feature phones, people still tend to continue to use their old feature phones that only support up to 2G/3G networks.
Read More – Possible Effects of Increasing the Minimum Broadband Speed to 100 Mbps in a Country
A recent GSMA report said that globally, there were about 600 million users who were using a feature phone to consume mobile internet at the end of 2022. This is an area where smartphone OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) can tap into to increase their market share and enable consumers to access high-speed network services.