100M Indian mobiles (Nearly 150M total phones)

Razib Ahmed points out this announcement from the Indian government press information bureau.

With the country’s gross subscriber base touching almost 150 million, India joined the world’s 100 million mobile club. India has now become the fifth to join the elite club – the others being China, the USA, Japan and Russia.
...
It may be pointed out that two years ago the country’s telephone subscriber base was only 75 million which has now ballooned to more than 150 million taking the tele-density of the country from the meager 7.08 per cent to 13.54 per cent.

I'm glad to see this, even if it's been anticipated for weeks.  India is an exciting place and a tremendous opportunity for NMS both as a market and as a talent pool that's now an integral part of our company.

On the hand I'm disappointed, as India could be doing even better with some well understood policy changes.  I've discussed this in the past while comparing telecom in India vs. China and India vs. Pakistan, and in comments I wrote after speaking on ICT in Rural India at Globalcomm India last February.

In the past two years as India's combined fixed & mobile teledensity went from 7.08% to 12.54%, Pakistan's total teledensity went from around 6% to over 22% (see PTA's telecom indicators here). Bangladesh also appears to be growing teledensity more rapidly than India although I only have data for 2003 thru mid-2005.

Comments

[Razib Ahmed]

"In the past two years as India's combined fixed & mobile teledensity went from 7.08% to 12.54%, Pakistan's total teledensity went from around 6% to over 22% (see PTA's telecom indicators here)."
You are right but we have to think of one factor here. The difference in size of population. Pakistan's population is roughly 15% compared to that of India. And India is much bigger than Pakistan and that is why building networks of mobile phone and landphone is more expensive and difficult. Finally, Indian government has been a bit conservative about allowing foreign investment in this sector and the result is that in Pakistani foreign mobile operators are have almost all the market share but in India, Indian mobile operators have significant market share.
I am not supporting or opposing any country here. I just like to point out that the nature of development, investment and government policy have been a bit different in these two countries and thus we have different scenario.

[brough]

Razib, I agree that India and Pakistan have very different populations, but it might make more sense to compare population density if you are concerned about the capital cost of wireless coverage.

Using the lastest numbers from the CIA World Factbook, I come up with population densities (in people per sq. km.) of 213 in Pakistan and 368 in India. I recognize there could be different levels of urbanization, but the raw numbers suggest lower capital costs per mobile phone subscriber to roll out coverage in India (vs. Pakistan) and even lower costs per subscriber in Bangladesh (1097 people per sq. km.).