Thaindian News

New Delhi, May 3 (IANS) The actual tele-density of the country stands at 41 percent with just 500 million-plus active mobile phone connections against the spurting 800 million figure projected so far, a study said Tuesday.

The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) pegs the subscriber base in February 2011 at 791 million with a net addition of 20 million subscribers in the month, adding that the active wireless subscribers were 563 million. The March data says the mobile subscriber base stands at 811.59 million with merely 573.97 million active subscribers.

The active subscriber base is calculated on the basis of visitor location register (VLR).

VLR is a temporary database of the subscribers who have roamed into the particular area, which it serves. Each base station in the network is served by exactly one VLR, hence a subscriber cannot be present in more than one VLR at a time.

“The 563 million VLR in February means that the remaining 228 million subscribers are inactive users (mostly prepaid ones) who have not recharged their SIMs for a long time and are in the ‘grace period’ before disconnection,” said the survey conducted by Voice and Data, a CyberMedia group journal.

“The second major caveat is that these are subscriptions, not subscribers. If a person has two SIM cards, he will show up as two subscribers in the TRAI data,” it added.

There is no firm data on multiple-SIM ownership, a very major trend in India, going by the large number of dual and triple SIM handsets sold.

According to conservative industry estimates, multiple-SIM ownership comprise 15 to 30 percent of total SIMS.

“If you want to compute the real tele-density, to know how many real people own a mobile phone in India, you have to exclude inactive subscriptions and multi-SIM ownership. The assumptions we have made are conservative. The real picture could be more stark,” said Prasanto K. Roy, chief editor, Voice and Data.

“This does mean that the addressable market for handset makers and operators alike is bigger than most people thought — over 200 million bigger. It means over 700 million people do not yet have mobile phones or subscriptions, and that makes this the biggest market in the world for the decade ahead,” he added.

According to Naveen Mishra, Lead India telecoms analyst at CyberMedia Research, affordable lifetime connection plans and bundling of SIM cards with mobile handsets at a starting price of Rs.500 has led to the surge in mobile connections.