Mobile Phones Widen Market, Raise Incomes for Rural Poor

The conclave also heard Bharti Airtel vice-president T V Sriram presenting three scenarios of rural poor benefiting from mobile phone service.

Suggesting a solution to the problem of raising per user revenue in rural areas, the Sun Micro executive called for "moving the aggregation of content on to the platform of the networks to enable rural users to access a wide range of services that gave end user value in the rural context Java had made this possible" he added.

Shri Sridhara claimed that the Indian telecom network was already better than that in many other countries. He urged service providers to offer VoIP (voice on Internet Protocol). "Indian innovators should develop software like Skype to compete with it and enable Indian answer to evolve to provide low cost long distance voice service" he said.

To overcome the falling revenue per unit user in the rural context, both volume game and additional services like advertisements should be pursued so that service to the user would be economic at a very low cost to him. Indian manufacturers also should do long term planning for the right product through adequate investment in R&D, which was not happening now, he added. In Taiwan they were focusing on the futuristic WiMax putting almost a fourth of their R&D funds in that development. Industry analyst Arpita Pal Agarwal , Associate Director of Pricewatehouse Coopers (PwC) also felt that domestic manufacturing industry had failed to throw up a t least one world-class company.

While admitting the tremendous challenge that telecom companies would face in the attempt to cover rural areas, all the panelists at the discussion agreed with Mr Jagbir Singh, CTO - Mobility, Bharti Airtel that "we are positive about rural coverage". Mr Singh however explained the difficulties operators were facing in getting the power connection and then regular power supply for the cell sites to function. Back up power with solar or other sources added to the cost heavily. The low population density in rural areas necessitated more towers and higher ones that further raised costs. Language was another problem and there were many dialects that had no alphabet. To meet these challenges Jagbir Singh suggested simplifying product access, offering customer centric solutions like songs, music, hello tunes that are popular and sharing infrastructure.

 ...continued

Posted to the site on 24th September 2007