Rural India Snaps Up Mobile Phones | Hacker News Reader

Rural India Snaps Up Mobile Phones

online.wsj.com

9 pointsprakash6 comments

Mobile phones sales are doing well not just in the rural areas but in the bigger cities as well. Everyone has one - from the guy who drives me in an auto to the maid who comes in to clean my house.

And their mobiles are usually really good models too - better than mine most of the time. It's stuff like this that gives me hope that India is getting upwardly mobile [ excuse the pun :-) ].

Most of the revenue generated by cell phone service providers through their walled gardens seems to be from voice and not data. It would be interesting to see how long these service providers would continue to be profitable given their decreasing margins. Usage of the so called smart phones that help provide value added data services is not to be found in large numbers. Also, access to data is pretty expensive (when compared to the quality of service offered in the US). There have been instances of a few startups that have worked around this problem of expensive data services.

For example, there is this startup that strips and forwards email from lets say gmail, yahoo etc to an email associated with the cell phone number as an SMS for a very low price. SMS seems to be a very viable and inexpensive solution to target a large user base.

Could you explain why you say that margins are decreasing for voice calls? My mobile bill hasn't changed much over the last few years.

I am not sure why your cell phone bill has not changed much over the past few years. However, a quick Google search returned these results, and this information seems to be at least two years old:

http://in.rediff.com/money/2007/jan/10mobile.htm http://money.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?sid=10&cid=13...

"Bharti Airtel is investing $2 billion in 2006-07 to ensure the 'death of distance', which, hopefully, will further bring down call charges by 15-20 per cent. Moreover, with sharing of infrastructure among operators and the reduced burden of revenue sharing for universal access service licence (UASL), basic and cellular mobile service providers will lower operating costs and the benefits may again be passed on to the consumer.

Bottomline: If you pay Re 1 a minute for a local call today, you may have to pay 80 paise for the same tomorrow. Talk is cheap, tech is chief."

Thats a 20% reduction in margin.

Thanks. You're right - I did a couple of google searches too and they all came up with "lowered tarrifs".

I've just checked around though, and it doesn't seem to have made much of an impact on many people's bills (at least in my office). Maybe we compensate by calling more or longer.

There is an enormous opportunity here. Agriculture is a huge vertical which is operating inefficiently in India today. One short of finances and second directions.

Micropayment startups like Dhanax are really enabling farmers on #1 and now with broader reach if someone can enable #2 more effectively, it can essentially improve lives of one of a billion people.

Vision problem in Indian agriculture is a more complex issue.

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