Telcos bullish on data biz

Telecom service providers in West Bengal are harping on data business to grow revenues.

Industry figures indicate that data services account for 8 per cent of a service provider’s revenues. However, many operators consider SMS revenue as part of the data revenue.

At present, there are 10 mn data cards, USB modems, and internet-enabled mobile phones in the Indian market. Growing businesses in all segments, necessity to access emails and corporate applications during urgent business trips and the urge for some entertainment while on the move are some drivers increasing the demand for data card usage.

Although all players are competing with each other to give affordable tariff rates for their data cards, the rates are very high when compared to countries like the UK. In the UK, wireless broadband connection through 3G technology costs about £10 per month and that too with a data download speed faster than 256 Kbps. International travelers who have used data cards with faster speed are not satisfied with data cards and USB modems services offered in India. So, in India, data cards mean accessing a bare minimum net connectivity only for a sizeable population, reason why, data cards have not taken off as largely in India as in some of the other countries.

“The awareness and demand for wireless internet connectivity is increasing rapidly and with laptop and PC sales showing exponential growth, there is a huge demand for wireless high-speed internet access,” said Sanjiv Sinha, regional head – East and COO, Kolkata Circle, Tata Teleservices.

Tata Teleservices launched Photon mobile broadband service in Kolkata in March this year and has already sold 10,000 in the city. The Photon Plus service claims to be 20 time faster than the existing wireless data card connections, and approximately 10 times than the availability of average broadband connection speed in the country. The service is said to be offering a speed of 3.1 mbps and many other wireless internet operators have already started to match its speed. The service is available at a price of Rs 3,500. Alternatively, for the business segment, the router is being made available at a refundable security deposit of Rs 6,999 and a one-time activation fee of Rs 1,000.

Deepak Srivastava, chief executive officer of Bharti Airtel's integrated West Bengal and Orissa circle said, “We expect over 100 per cent growth for our data business, as the base is small right now. Voice currently makes up 90 per cent of our revenues and value-added-services, including SMSes, contribute rather small right now.” “Also, we expect to concentrate on rural pockets as the telecom penetration level in rural Bengal is 30 per cent compared to other states where it is over 50 per cent. There would not be much of a tariff difference between rural and urban Bengal because this is already one of the cheapest telecom circles in India,” Shrivastava said.

Another focus area is Airtel’s potential for convergence of its various services. “We have broadband, DTH and mobility, which could be combined to come up with bundled offers. We are currently evaluating various possibilities,” Shrivastava said.

According to Vsevolod Rozanov, President and CEO, Shyam Sistema Teleservices, the newest entrant in the Bengal telecom circle, the company will soon be launching its first innovative value propositions for CRBT and downloads. These will be supported by the introduction of the ‘BREW’ platform, that is expected to enable a rich customer experience for these services.

“We have plans to foray into the data services market. We will make inroads with our data cards and other data related products like wireline and wireless broadband. We are planning to also launch the USB data modems and high speed data services this year. These are currently under trial,” said Rozanov.