Prabhjot Singh Saroya, business manager for Ericsson Mobility World India, reports that in the area of mobile data services, ringtones and games are the most popular categories of all downloadable content, with the two accounting for between 50 and 60 percent of all downloads. Games alone are generating more than 200,000 downloads per month at an average cost of between USD 1 and 2 per game. Some premium games can cost as much as USD 5. Top downloads include event-based games, such as cricket, and games in connection with Bollywood and Hollywood movie openings such as I Robot.

MMS is beginning to make inroads in urban areas, but Saroya says person-to-person messaging has yet to take off because of the inability to send messages between different operator's networks.

SMS is still the cash cow for value-added services and is driven primarily by the youth segment. On the other hand, the enterprise applications market is very small. Operators are looking at strategies to deploy these applications in the future.

Mobile email access is just being introduced to the market. Operator Bharti recently introduced the Blackberry service and Hutchison offers mobile email access to Exchange users.

Ringback tone services, launched about six months ago by Bharti under the brand name Hello Tunes, are already generating a lot of heat in the market. Other operators in the market are monitoring the success of Bharti's service closely. The service is subscription based, with a fixed monthly fee and a charge for each ringback tone a user selects.

Location-based applications are also on the roadmaps of many operators and are expected to be in service by the end of 2005.

A critical issue for content providers is adaptability to the local market. India is a multicultural and multilingual market so local content is extremely important. Indian music, Indian movies and other local content, such as religious services, are popular, in addition to western popular music and movies. Still, the main categories of content services are quite similar everywhere: customers usually want information such as stock quotes and weather reports, as well as entertainment such as music, sports, and movies.

About 1 million people subscribe to GPRS services. In addition, Airtel is rolling out the first phase of its EDGE-network in 14 cities across India. The network is scheduled for completion this year.

Analysts estimate the mobile data segment value this year at USD 48 million, with an annual growth of 125 percent.

The Indian mobile market nearly doubled its penetration during the first three quarters of 2003. The country took nearly eight years to achieve 10 million subscribers, yet it doubled that number in less than a year during 2003. This translates to staggering year-on-year growth of 175 percent. The infrastructure is the most up-to-date in the world, with most leading GSM operators deploying EDGE and all CDMA operators deploying CDMA 2000 - 1X. After a slow start, following commercial launch in March 2003, CDMA adoption came on strong in the second half of the year.

To date, the market for mobile handsets has been marginal at best. With no domestic mobile phone manufacturing facilities, all handsets are still imported. Because of this, sales have been low because of the high import duties and other charges, fueling a large unauthorized market for mobile phones. These unofficial sales accounted for as much as 80 percent of all handsets sold in 2002. The situation is improving, and the adoption of camera phones is on the upturn, thanks to the introduction of a number of models priced under USD 200.

Population: 1,065,070,607
Median age: 24.4 years
Literacy rate: 59.5 percent
Languages: English enjoys associate status, but is the most important language for national, political, and commercial communication; Hindi is the national language and primary tongue of 30 percent of the people. There are 14 other official languages: Bengali, Telugu, Marathi, Tamil, Urdu, Gujarati, Malayalam, Kannada, Oriya, Punjabi, Assamese, Kashmiri, Sindhi, and Sanskrit; Hindustani is a popular variant of Hindi/Urdu spoken widely throughout northern India, but is not an official language.
Unemployment rate in 2003: 9.5 percent Economic growth in 2003: 8.3 percent.

44.51 million mobile phone users (November 2004)
43.96 million fixed line telephone users (November 2004)

The main operators for GSM are Bharti, BSNL, Hutchison and IDEA. The main CDMA operators are Relaince and Tata.

India has recorded the highest annual mobile subscriber growth (more than 100 percent) from the second quarter of 2003 onwards.

The annual growth rate for the quarter ending March 2004 and June 2004 was 140 percent and 116 percent respectively.

The lowest tariffs in the country have resulted in an increase in the monthly minutes of use, which were 309 at the end of June 2004, as compared with 295 for the previous quarter. The average mobile spending in India is 0.8 percent of GDP.

Expansion of domestic service, although still weak in rural areas, resulted from increased competition and dramatic reductions in price, led in large part by wireless services; mobile cellular service (both CDMA and GSM) introduced in 1994 and organized nationwide into four metropolitan cities and 19 telecom circles. In recent years, significant trunk capacity has been added in the form of fiber-optic cable and one of the world's largest domestic satellite systems, the Indian National Satellite system (INSAT), with five satellites supporting 33,000 very small aperture terminals (VSAT).

Prabhjot Singh Saroya, business manager for Ericsson Mobility World India, CIA World Factbook

By John Maxwell Hobbs