Event Report: MoMo Mumbai December
Aditya Mishra of TCS has written an event summary of MoMo Mumbai’s December event in the Mint newspaper.
First, rural does not indicate poor. Service providers found mobile users in rural areas willing to pay good money, if offered the right services. However, local content would be key to growing the rural VAS market, said Krishna [...]
On The Gobar
Some of the oldest forms of fuel, cow dung, jatropha and cottonseed, may help power rural mobile telephony in India. The country’s first base station powered by biofuel is set to become operational at a rural area near Pune in the next couple of weeks.
The rural areas are plagued by erratic power supply and mobile [...]
BSNL to launch sub-1000 handsets
BSNL is in talks with Taiwanese and Chinese handset manufacturers to launch a sub-Rs 1000 handset for the rural market.
According to ET, BSNL has begun preliminary talks with Taiwan’s Compal and China’s TCL Communication Technology (TCT) for a single chip GSM handset.
“The mobiles will be based on single-chip technology. The SIM card will be non-removable [...]
BSNL goes all out to connect rural India
In a bid to lay a cellular network covering the entire population in the country, the state-owned company is leaving no stone unturned.
It is using even helicopters to fly down mobile equipment in areas where the road network is yet to reach. And if that’s not enough, BSNL has hired a fleet of trucks that [...]
Sony Ericsson eyes small towns for expansion
Sony Ericsson will focus more on the smaller towns across the country for its expansion plans. Its distribution partners Ingram and Salona will focus retailing in the small cities and town.
“Our 60 per cent of the business comes from B and C category towns. In bigger cities, the market is more for replacement customers,” he [...]
Govt aid to telcos for rural telephony
The government has reached a landmark deal with telecom companies under which it will fund operators to create telecom infrastructure in rural India from the Universal Service Obligation Fund.
As per the agreement, the government will extend financial support for both passive (land, tower and power back-up) and active (BTS, antennae and a portion of the [...]
National rural telecom licence
In yet another move to increase the rural tele-density, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) has recommended that the government create a national rural telecom licence, that allows companies to operate all kinds of telecom services, exclusively in rural areas.
The regulator has proposed that companies which offer services under the new licence be charged [...]
Connecting Bharat
Sunil Jain has a good article in Business Standard discussing TRAI’s latest recommendations on rural telephony.
Since 2002, the government has levied a cess of 5% on telephone bills to fund rural phones through the Universal Service Obligation fund. The USO Fund collected a whopping Rs 7,254 crore till April but had disbursed only Rs 1,815 [...]
Towns and rural markets driving growth
Rural and semi-urban India are not the mobile markets of the future. They are the present; already taking a lead. Cellular growth over the last 12 months has been largely driven by subscriber additions in smaller towns and rural markets. The Indian cellular market has witnessed an average growth of 3.5% per month during the [...]
Increasing rural teledensity
Telecom Regulatory Authority of India plans to raise the teledensity in rural areas from the current 1.9% to 15% by 2007 and has proposed a Rs 8,000 crore subsidy for creating necessary infrastructure. With this kind of subsidy support, it will be possible to install 20,000 base stations in rural areas to cover about 80-90% [...]


