The telecom industry in India continues to register impressive figures with record subscribers being raked in every month in boom. However, this growth doesn’t register directly with traditional fixed line operators who face the same set of challenges as are faced by their counterparts in the rest of Asia Pacific and the world.
Traditional behemoths like BSNL continue to lose a major chunk of their subscribers to the mobile partners. Around six million subscribers were added to the mobile subscriber base in the country in the last month though the fixed line telephony service providers showed a falling customer base.
Also, existing fixed subscribers are showing their backs to the traditional behemoths by surrendering their lines in favour of mobile telephony or using VoIP (mostly illegal) to communicate, causing loss of revenues to the fixed line service providers.
On the other hand, though the mobile operators are adding to their kitty, they have not been able to show a substantial increase in their Average Revenue Per User (ARPU). Moreover, with mobile operators continually failing to provider standard voice quality in the dense pockets, they stand at a huge risk to lose subscribers in the long run.
At this point of time, Fixed Mobile Convergence looks very promising to both wireless and wireline networks.
