The Indian mobile market has added 20.55 million new customers in the first four months of 2007 - less than the 20.96 million recorded in the same period in 2006. There are two reasons for this shortfall.
Firstly, in April 2006 Reliance Communications made an adjustment to the way it counted mobile subscribers, including its fixed-wireless customers in the figures for the first time and boosting its ranks as a result.
Secondly, March 2007 saw the termination of India’s customer re-verification procedure whereby the personal details of all of the country’s mobile subscribers had to be checked by the operators - and a procedure which saw the same operator, Reliance, disconnect some 4 million unverified customers. Read more.
Qualcomm has come under some pressure recently when Reliance, with one of the fastest growing CDMA-based networks in the world based on Qualcomm’s patented technology, announced that it would provide mobile service using GSM technology and criticised Qualcomm’s high royalty and licensing fees. The inference was that Qualcomm’s fees were resulting in higher costs for handsets which is preventing Reliance from offering affordable service to low-income subscribers.
Qualcomm claims that CDMA handset prices in India were already some of the lowest in the world and that royalty was only about $2 per handset. It further argues that Reliance’s move into GSM has to do with flawed spectrum policy of the Indian Telecom Ministry (DoT) that provides more than twice the spectrum to GSM operators compared to…
Tags: CDMA, CDMA technology, GSM, GSM technology, India, Indian Telecom Ministry, mobile service using GSM technology, Paul Jacobs, Qualcomm, Reliance, Tata, USD.
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