Source: The Hindu Business Line, Apr 15, 2013
New mobile operators Uninor, Sistema Shyam and Videocon Mobile Services are charting out fresh game plan to get back into the telecom market.
The three companies were part of the new players that were given licences in 2008 but got severely hit after the 2G spectrum scam led to their licences being cancelled.
Source: The Hindu Business Line, Feb 13, 2013
Telecom tower companies maybe allowed retaining 100 per cent Foreign Direct Investment, even after being brought under the purview of the unified licence regime. An internal committee set up by the Department of Telecom has said that lowering the FDI cap to 74 per cent may impact investor sentiments.
The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India had suggested this move to bring FDI norms for the telecom infrastructure segment at par with service providers.
Source: The Hindu Business Line, Jan 08, 2013
Before we move to 2013, how did we do with our predictions for 2012? Judging ourselves we scored a smidgeon north of 
3/5. Here’s what we said and what actually happened.
The best-laid plans for the industry were punctured by the Supreme Court decisions of February, and so much of the 2012 agenda is unfinished. For 2013, we could be boring and opt for the same 5 trends again.
For the long-term, however, we believe further regulatory developments will gradually (with a few stumbles along the way) enable reforms to gather pace, and so we’ve had a go at a refreshed set of trends to look out for in 2013.
Slowdown in subscriber growth:
Growth is already down to 6 million subscribers a month, compared to 3 million a week two years’ ago. With rural network expansion still slow, and disconnections increasing due to operators ridding their bases of dormant accounts, we expect a real slowdown in overall subs growth.
Network comesback to life:
The next few years will be underlined by intense network planning, innovation and diversification. Every operator is spectrum-starved and most will be looking for ways to manage scarce network resource to deliver better quality at lower cost. Tower companies will be looking for opportunities to extend their role beyond passive infrastructure. The network is always a long play, and 2013 will see the start of a new phase of activity.
Focus on return on capital:
As headline revenue growth slows up, CFOs will knuckle down hard on departments to justify investments and expenditure, especially in the network, product development and IT. There will be a constructive tension between the need to contain costs and the desire to push new activities such as innovation.
Excite the customer:
Data services disappointed us in 2012, and rather than predicting that 2013 will change all of that, we think service providers will look to engage customers through new services and “experience.” We put our money on one niche service launching this year which will make an impact and mobile advertising could be part of it, and at least on one operator opening an exciting retail experience store somewhere in a major metro.
Litigation, litigation:
We do not believe that all of the regulatory decisions that will be taken these few months will be easily accepted. The industry will take positions, sometimes united and sometimes divided, on spectrum, reframing and liberalisation issues.
Overall, we saw 2012 as being a tough year for telecoms in all senses, and we expect 2013 to be a year of hard grind — in the marketplace, in reorienting operational focus, in building exciting offerings for the customer, and in handling regulatory surprises.
Source: Business standard, Dec 14, 2012
New Delhi: Come February, mobile users would be able to retain their numbers even if they relocate from one telecom circle to another. That’s not all; early 2013 onwards, when travelling out of their home city, they would not even have to shell out the hefty roaming charges that swell their bills.
Speaking at a telecom summit organised by industry chamber Ficci, IT & Communications Minister Kapil Sibal today announced the government was planning to roll out the nationwide mobile number portability (MNP) from February 2013. Also, he said, consumers would not have to pay roaming charges from early next year.
Cellular Operators Association of India ( COAI) Director-General Rajan Mathews said the move to allow operators to offer the same number across all circles would help relocating subscribers. “It will also help existing operators, as it is likely a subscriber would prefer to stay on with a mobile operator if he gets to remain the same number. But the number of relocating subscribers is one-two per cent of the total mobile user base. So, it may not have have a very significant impact on operators.”
IT’S ONE NATION
Nationwide MNP
1-2% of mobile user base to benefit
Free roaming
(What the users won’t have to pay)
Outgoing calls: Applicable call charges + roaming charge ranging from 75 paise to Rs 1 per minute
Incoming calls: Roaming charge ranging from 75 paise to Rs 1 a minute
904.23 million: Total number of wireless subscribers (as on Oct 31)
10-12%: Proportion of subscribers availing of roaming services
Rs 1.30 lakh cr: Telcos’ estimated income from roaming charges
Rs 13,500 cr: Telcos’ likely revenue loss in absence of roaming services
Operators say they would require around $10 million to build the enabling structure for nationwide MNP. The service would help pan-Indian players gain subscribers at the cost of the operators whose customers relocate to states they are not present in.
Free roaming is likely to benefit over 12 per cent of mobile users. But operators’ bottom lines would be impacted, as they would pay the national long-distance cost. Mathews said operators could take a hit of Rs 13,500 crore and many might be forced to raise the normal charges to offset the impact.
Other experts, however, say the hit telcos would take would be neutralised within two years as cheaper call rates would encourage consumers to talk more while travelling.
Source: The Economic Times, Dec 14, 2012
NEW DELHI: India will address concerns worrying investors and provide a platform for driving growth in the telecom industry as it puts in place a forward-looking policy regime, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said Thursday.
He said that the difficult times for the Indian telecom industry were over as the government had taken several steps over the last year to ensure stability in the sector.
“This sector had had to face some tough challenges in the past months. However, I believe that the period of difficulties is now coming to an end. I am confident that the futuristic policy regime that we are putting in place will address the concerns that have been worrying investors and will provide a new impetus to the growth of telecommunications in the country,” Singh said at the India Telecom Summit, organised by the DoT and Ficci.
The prime minister said that the government announced the National Telecom Policy 2012 and clarified some complex issues over the last year. He added that the government had also ‘ensured adequate availability of spectrum and its allocation in a transparent maker through market related processes’.
Singh’s statement comes at a time when the industry is deliberating on participating in the second round of auctions after an inter-ministerial panel reduced the reserve price of 2G spectrum by 30 per cent from Rs 14,0000 crore in four circles. The recently conducted auctions failed with no bidders for these four circles as reserve price was 10 times higher compared to 2001.
The government last month wrapped up the first round of auctioning 2G spectrum which was made available after the Supreme Court cancelled 122 mobile permits belonging to nine mobile phone companies in February.
The Indian telecom industry that has battled months of regulatory uncertainty and pressure from local and foreign investors got the first signs of clarity as the government laid down rules for determining price of spectrum in the future.
Singh said that the sector has seen phenomenal growth over the past decade and has been the driver of FDI and FII flows into the country. He added that telcos should now look at improving domestic manufacturing capabilities and availability of nationwide broadband services.
“The advent of smartphones and tablets at reasonable prices along with wide availability of telecom infrastructure across our country would provide an opportunity for us to ensure an equitable spread of broadband services. We must, therefore, seize this opportunity,” he said.
Singh asked the government departments and the private sector to work creatively to ensure that infrastructure of the National Optical Fibre Network, set up to provide broadband capability to all panchayats, is efficiently used to make broadband services ‘affordable and accessible’.
Concerned on the ‘thinning down’ of the domestic manufacturing capabilities in the last two decades, Singh said that the government had laid out the telecom and electronics policies and that it was up to the ‘captains’ of the private sector to create ecosystems that enable India to be a major hardware producer.
He added that the industry should go deeper into rural India, where mobile phone penetration was still minimal and that there was ‘an economic case for investing in business at the bottom of the pyramid’.
Source: The Hindu Business Line, Oct 03, 2012
New Delhi: Operating on razor-thin margins in cut-throat environments, telecom brands around the world are looking to social media to win the hearts and minds of their young customers.
This is a take-no-prisoners battle and the Indian telecom brands have emerged global pioneers when it comes to engaging their respective communities.
Simply put, Indian telecom brands are showing the world how social media is done.
In the first report of its type, Unmetric, the social media benchmarking company based in New York, released a study of top six Indian and US telecom brands on Facebook and Twitter today.
According to the Unmetric Score, Tata DoCoMo is the global leader in the telecom sector on Facebook. It scored 77 in August and has consistently topped the rankings since records began in June 2011. Idea was the second best performing telecom brand in the world on Facebook with a score of 58. Aircel, India’s seventh largest carrier, was the third best performing brand with a score of 53.
In the US, AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile scored 55, 54 and 51, respectively, for their Facebook performance in August 2012.
Underlying the report is the Unmetric Score, a unique sector-based measurement scored between 0 and 100. A score is generated for the brands’ Facebook, Twitter and YouTube presence and factors in multiple quantitative and qualitative metrics, scientifically blended and weighted together to produce a single benchmarkable score.
“A key part of the success of Indian telecom brands on Facebook comes down to the way they are engaging their community. On average, nearly four per cent of the fans of Indian brands are engaging in some way with the page whereas only 3 per cent of fans engage with the US brands,” Unmetric said.
This can also be seen in the Unmetric Engagement Score, where each post by an Indian telecom company scored an average of 99 compared to the US telecom companies that scored an average Engagement Score of 66 for each post.
Content strategy
As the most engaging telecom brand in the world, analysis of Tata DoCoMo’s content strategy revealed that its “Win a HTC Desire VC” contest generated a huge amount of engagement.
Airtel focused on its current ‘Friendship’ campaign with most posts revolving in some way around this theme.
However, when brands stop talking about themselves, they saw the best levels of engagement. Aircel saw higher than normal levels of engagement when it discussed sports and festivals such as Onam and Janmashtami.
On Twitter, the Indian telecom brands proved to be remarkably adept at leveraging the platform as a customer support channel.
In August 2012, Indian telecom brands replied to over 9,100 tweets compared with US brands which replied to just over 2,000 tweets.
Airtel is the leading telecom brand on Twitter, replying to over 5,130 tweets in an average of 58 minutes per tweet. Vodafone India also uses its Twitter account for customer service, replying to nearly 3,000 tweets but takes over 11 hours to reply to tweets.
Sprint, the No.3 telecom brand in the US, replied to tweets marginally quicker, in an average of 57 minutes but only replied a total of 1,006 times.
Source: IBEF.org, Oct 01, 2012
New Delhi: The government on Friday allowed foreign entities to participate in the upcoming 2G auctions without an Indian partner. However, the players should form a joint venture with the Indian partner.
According to the new guidelines issued on Friday by department of telecommunications (DoT), foreign entities can participate in the auctions directly and obtain a licence.
Source: The Economic Times, Sept 05, 2012
NEW DELHI: A telecom department panel has recommended tightening of norms for remote access, the provision to monitor data and voice traffic on cellular networks from remote locations across the globe. The panel has said that all players must create an on-line mirror image and audit trail of the remote access information.
Source: The Hindu Business Line, Jul 09, 2012
Bangalore: The mobile handset market in India declined by 5 per cent by revenue to Rs 31,215 crore during financial year 2011-12 against Rs 33,031 crore last year, a Voice & Data survey said on Monday.
The biggest impact has been on Indian phone brands such as Micromax, Spice and G5 due to declining sales in the feature phone segment and falling average selling value. Barring Karbonn and Lava, most of the other players have seen falling revenues, according to the survey.
Source: Business standard, Jul 05, 2012
New Delhi: The Department of Telecommunications (DoT) on Wednesday released the initial norms for auction of 2G spectrum, but the crucial aspect of reserve price of spectrum is yet to be decided by an empowered group of ministers.
The government will auction eight blocks of spectrum in the 1,800 MHz band, and each block will be of 1.25 MHz, and the validity of the spectrum auctioned will be for 20 years, DoT said in a notice on its website.
