Telecom Lead Asia: India’s mobile users will celebrate 20 years of enjoying wireless connectivity next year as National Telecom Policy 1994 turns 20 in 2014.
TelecomLead.com, which is celebrating second anniversary in May, is taking up 20 years of wireless connectivity as an occasion to reveal the ups and downs in the industry.
Over the last two decades, Indian telecom industry witnessed revolutionary growth, but it also confronted several challenges. During this period, we saw emergence of telecom service providers, mobile phone vendors, innovations, content players, etc.
This period also witnessed exit of several entrepreneurs, CEOs, CXOs and technologies from the Indian telecom market. Today, we celebrate iPhone 5, Galaxy S4, Nokia Lumia, Facebook, 3G, 4G, etc.
If Reliance Communications is announcing 20 percent increase in mobile tariff, BSNL CXOs are meeting to revive the company and the country is seeing the partial exit of Telenor, it’s because of the impact of NTP 1994. Lack of policies has affected us.
When NTP 1994 was announced India’s telephone density was about 0.8 per hundred persons as against the world average of 10 per hundred persons. It was lower than that of many developing countries of Asia like China (1.7), Pakistan (2), Malaysia (13) etc. There were about 8 million lines with a waiting list of about 2.5 million. Nearly 1.4 lakh villages, out of a total of 576,490 villages in the country, were covered by telephone services. There were more than 1 lakh public call offices in the urban areas, TRAI noted two decades ago.
Today, we have around 800 million mobile phone connections, 15 million broadband connections, etc.
READ TRAI report on NTP 1994
TRAI had noted that the release of 2.5 million additional lines alone would require extra resources to the tune of Rs 11,750 crore at a unit cost of Rs. 47,000 per line at 1993-94 prices. The target was to achieve 15.8 million lines in April 1997.
Salute to stakeholders. TelecomLead.com, through a series of interactions with the industry in the next 12 months, will cover Telecom 20. It will talk about future opportunities and what we need to do to gain from NTP 1994.
I started ICT journalism in 1995, one year after NTP 1994, when there was no cell phone allocated to me. I used to have a shared a computer to access Internet, primarily to access BSE bulletins. Our telecom life has changed. We can continue to evolve.
pix source: The Hindu
