The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) feels India has the potential to become No. 1 in terms of the number of mobile phone users.
This is considering the number of people currently without mobile phones in the country. Currently, China has the highest number of mobile phone subscribers.
At the launch of the latest ITU Asia-Pacific Telecommunication Indicators report on Monday at the ITU Telecom Asia 2002, Michael Minges, head, Telecommunications Data and Statistics Unit, ITU Telecommunication Bureau, said: "India has the least mobile connectivity with only 10.1 million subscribers as compared with China. India is the largest unserved market and therefore there is huge potential."
According to the report, in the last 10 years the telecommunication environment in the Asia-Pacific region has changed rapidly. The rate of change has been the most dramatic in the mobile communication sector.
The region now leads the world in several important market categories. Two of the top three countries worldwide (Taiwan, China and Hong Kong), measured by mobile phones per capita (as at the end of 2001) are from the region.
Statistics show that there are 339 million mobile subscribers in the region in 2001 compared with just 25 million in 1995. The compounded annual growth rate over this period was 55 per cent, with an average growth of over 80 per cent per year in over half a dozen of the region's developing nations.
While China had a 11.2 per cent cellular penetration rate at end-2001, India's ratio was only 0.6 per cent.
The latest ITU Asia-Pacific Telecommunication Indicators report also says that the cost of basic telephony had decreased to one-fourth in the last decade. As per capita income of $1,000, which resulted in a teledensity of 2.4 in 1991, was now worth 9.1.
The report says the "epicenter" of the telecom industry is shifting from North America and Europe to the Asia-Pacific region.
A decade ago, Asia accounted for 22 per cent of the world's telecom subscribers, compared with 36 per cent in Europe. Now Asia has 36 per cent of all phone customers, larger than both Europe and the US. Half of these new connections came from China, the report said.
"Never before has a country added so many telephone subscribers so quickly and raised its teledensity so rapidly," the report said. China added 300 million new subscribers between 1991-2001, taking its combined teledensity from less than 1 to 30 by June 2002.
"People tend to say that the digital divide is widening, but in fact the digital divide is narrowing in this region. Where the digital divide is widening is between urban and rural areas," said Tim Kelly, head, strategy and policy unit.
"But the developing countries are still far behind the advanced countries such as Japan, US and Europe. It is the nature of the divide that is changing," he added.
Asia-Pacific's new position of leadership in global ICT markets brings with it a new responsibility. The region has largely avoided the telecom recession that has effected the rest of the world, and now it must play its part in restoring investor confidence in the industry, the report said.
