Low cost handsets to propel the growth of 3G in India: Ericsson

For those who are skeptical about the growth of 3G services in India, there is some good news. Ericsson, the Swedish telecom technologies provider, has said that the adoption of 3G services in India will be faster than it has been in other countries.
Speaking to Telecom Yatra, Johan Bergendahl, who is the vice president of marketing and group function sales at Ericsson, said, “3G started in Europe and people took some time to understand; Same thing happened in the US. In Japan, however, the adoption was good as subscribers there were already consuming data services. 3G just changed their experience.”
“In India, 3G services will be adopted very quickly, just like in Japan. The main reason for this is wide availability of cheaper 3G-enabled handsets, which will help a great deal in increasing the uptake of 3G services in India,” he added.
Sharing his view about Indian handset market he said, “Android, being a free ware, has already generated a lot of interest in the world. Even in India, due to the low cost of Android-based handsets, the operating system has the potential to become very big.”
According to a report by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), the growth of mobile services is expected to continue for the next 3-5 years, driven by high subscriber additions in mostly non urban areas. The mobile subscriber base is projected to cross one billion in 2014, growing at more than 9 per cent from 2010.
At present, VAS in India is mainly restricted to music related services such as ring tones, caller ring back tones and music downloads. Other services such as m-commerce and mobile TV are still to take off properly.
This scenario is expected to change after the roll out of 3G services – which means better multimedia content. The report says that data use on 3G networks will lead to 3G data service revenue of a little more than Rs 10,000 crore in 2015.