India Week continues at DTW

This is turning into 'India Week' here at DevelopingTelecomsWatch. Today's musings begin by revisiting yesterday's discussion here about the imposition of Mobile Number Portability (MNP) in the country. We will also consider - not for the first time - the ways in which the Indian Government's concerns about national security might lessen the appeal of this vast, growing market for foreign telecoms groups.

The reason we are returning to the MNP debate so quickly is that yesterday saw an open house discussion in Hyderabad on this theme. Hosted by the TRAI, India's telecoms regulatory body. This rejoiced in the snappy title 'Determination of Port Transaction Charge, dipping charge and porting charge for mobile number portability'. The surrounding media coverage provides more information on the range of concerns expressed by India's cellcos.

Speaking to an Economic Times reporter at the workshop was TRAI Chairman SJ Sharma, who said he expects MNP to go live on December 1st. While Sharma is confident that his agency will have its MNP regulations in place by the end of August, he expressed the belief that some of the operators do not seem to have ordered enabling equipment yet, meaning that a delay of 2-3 months is likely.

Yesterday, ahead of the Hyderabad discussions, we considered the estimated cost one operator had calculated for the implementation of MNP. State-owned BSNL had come up with a USD 250 million estimate, complaining about this cost in light of its contention that only 2% of "elite customers" are likely to use the facility.

Today, drawing on an article from K.V. Kurmanath of the Business Line, we can see how BSNL's numbers stack up against the estimates of some of its competitors in the mobile space.

Reliance Communications, and Tata Teleservices have indicated that they expected MNP-related expenditure to the tune of USD 20.6 million each. Vodafone India has come up with the much larger figure of USD 72.3 million. Much lower numbers than those mentioned by BSNL, then, but still pretty significant sums of money. I invite anyone with a view on this to offer an explanation for why this set of estimates varies so much.

"The regulator asked the service providers to send in their points on these issues by Tuesday," Mr T. R. Dua, Deputy Director-General of the Cellular Operators’ Association of India, told Business Line, whose article states that "keeping in mind the huge expenditure", the telecos want the TRAI to ensure that they are compensated for their "huge investments".

Let's see, then, if December 1st really is the date after which Indian mobile users can elect to switch their cellular providers while keeping their phone numbers.

In the meantime, I want to consider once again how the Indian authorities' concerns about national security are impacting on the telecoms sector.

In a recent piece here about worldwide developments across the footprint of Scandinavian telecoms group Telenor, I noted that the company had been facing difficulties around establishing a controlling interest in Unitech Wireless, the start-up Indian cellco in which it currently has a minority stake. For India's security agencies, the stumbling block was Telenor's presence in Pakistan and Bangladesh - apparently a cause for concern in light of strained relations with both of these neighbouring countries.

Telenor's immediate problem appears to have been resolved with the Indian Home Ministry's suggestion that security clearance for a bigger stake in Unitech Wireless up could be provided on the condition that none of the staff who have worked at the Norwegian firm's Pakistan operation are employed in India. Other security concerns affecting the telecoms sector more broadly, however, continue to be aired pretty regularly.

For example, all telecoms firms present in India may find themselves subject to further personnel restrictions. Late last week, Joji Thomas Philip of the Economic Times wrote that India's intelligence agencies now want all telcos to have a native Indian in the post of Chief Operating Officer. At present, only operators' CTOs need be a resident Indian citizens, while foreigners are allowed to hold all other key positions such as Chairman, MD, CEO and CFO, subject to clearance from the Home Ministry on a yearly basis.

If enforced soon, this proposed new regulation might not make a big impact right away because, as Philip notes, none of the existing telcos currently has a foreign COO.

This is not to say that such restrictions will have no impact, however. An article in today's Financial Times goes as far as stating that such stringent personnel requirements would lessen the appeal of India for foreign strategic investors and will restrict the freedom of companies already operating in India to make use of existing foreign expertise within their global organisations.

The article also contends that such restrictions on management positions could complicate corporate merger and acquisition activity such as Bharti Airtel's planned tie-up with MTN, the South African telecoms firm with interests across and beyond Africa. This would just add to the concerns of some analysts who are already sceptical about the wisdom of that proposed deal for Bharti Airtel shareholders. On Monday, India's Financial Express noted that day's 4.8% drop in the market-leading cellco's share price, which seems to have been triggered by worries that the company will increase by 5-10% its offer to buy a stake in MTN. The article quotes Sonam Udas, VP Research at BRICS Securities, who says: "we don't understand the logic for this deal at all. Why does Bharti want to change from a company with a net cash position of USD 1 billion to a debt-ridden firm? We do not buy the argument the deal is going to add value. There is nothing in the deal to highlight as adding strategic value."

Operators may not be the only telecoms value chain participants affected by the Indian Government's security concerns. Joji Thomas Philip writes that the Home Ministry fears that "suspect vendors may install back-door entries, remote logic facilities and also design Trojan horses in networks and hardware. This could be used to remotely bring down the network or to monitor it." Philip states that the agencies are particularly concerned about Chinese vendors.

One definite casualty of all this worry about national security is Swiss-registered firm ByCell. On Saturday, the Economic Times confirmed that after much wrangling, the company is to be prevented from entering the Indian mobile services market, with security concerns about the company and its shareholders being the deal-breaker.

A busy week for Indian market watchers so far, then. Let's see if the rest of the week has enough action in store to warrant another look here at DTW.

India Week continues at DTW

Rural VAS tipped to grow in India

Late last week, writing about mobile content/VAS in emerging markets, I wondered whether entertainment or highly practical applications offer the best growth prospects. With this in mind, I noticed today that back in February, Kunal Bajaj of BDA (a consultancy business which originated as an advisory firm specializing in China's telecommunications/media/technology sector) was tipping mobile applications that enhance productivity for people living in India's vast rural hinterland.

Kunal was a highly rated contributor to one of the first Com World Series events it was my pleasure to host while working with Informa Telecoms & Media - the COAI-endorsed GSM>3G India 2007 conference and exhibition in Mumbai. I found the presentation he made then (on an unrelated theme) highly compelling - the piece he wrote on February 2nd, which rounds up BDA's 2009 predictions for the telecoms sector is also a good read.

Kunal Bajaj believes that "rural VAS, especially affordable of ad-supported, local language application" of the productivity-enhancing variety "will emerge as a key differentiator in service offerings as operators pursue rural expansion more aggressively."

Kunal feels that a key driver for the development of such services is the already low level of tariffs and margins in rural areas. Basic voice and messaging, it seems, are not enough as operators penetrate the markets beyond the saturated urban centres. Of the applications I mentioned last week, Kunal appears to agree that "information-centric contextual applications, such as information about commodity prices, crop and weather data" look promising.

Rural VAS tipped to grow in India

Mobile price wars in the downturn: time to do battle?

Still reeling from the roaming bill I racked up on my last trip to the UAE in December, I was interested to see the Dubai Chronicle reporting a big cut in international calling prices on the part of Emirates Integrated Telecommunications Company, better known as Du.

For the first time, Du's prepaid customers can now use a AED 200 recharge card and receive AED 320 credit to towards international calling. Other Du recharge card denominations of AED 100, AED 50 and AED 20 will provide instant credits of AED 150, AED 70 and AED 26 respectively, to be used towards international calling.

Farid Faraidooni, EVP Commercial at Du says: "Every dirham counts, and more so in the case of the UAE, with a large expatriate population with the need to stay in touch with their loved ones back home."

This might make me think more seriously about getting myself a prepaid Du SIM for future trips to the Emirates. However, my situation is similar to that of Dean Bubley of Disruptive Wireless, who, in an amusing blog post this week, describes himself a frequent traveller, but to lots of different countries. Writing this Wednesday, Dean bemoaned the costs and complications of staying in touch with work contacts, friends and family while attending next week's Mobile World Congress. "One thing that's immediately apparent," writes Dean, "is that despite all the talk of VoIP, SIM-swapping and the like, I'm going to end up with a large bill for voice and SMS roaming. I've got dozens of meetings, loads of people I'll need to contact (or be contacted by), inevitable changes to schedules and venues, plus all the usual work and personal call traffic I'd normally get in the UK. I'll be paying for both inbound and outbound roaming calls."

"It's clearly not an option just to get a local SIM card - most of the people I need to contact will be outside Spain and there are too many people likely to contact me to inform everyone of a new number." Given that, as Dean says, keeping a Spanish SIM year-round would not work because it would expire after a few months without use, I had to sympathise when I read his remarks about WiFi not being an option due the likely (he says notorious!) congestion on the network provided at the Barcelona Fira (MWC venue). Dean also criticises VoWLAN service providers for having "haphazard support of SMS, which is absolutely mandatory at trade shows where you have back-to-back meetings."

Dean's suggested remedy for international travellers? "What would be good would be a way to get a local SIM or account/number - ideally without physically having to buy one - and for this to automatically propagated to all your contacts when you were in-country. Or for it to somehow be linked to your existing home account in the network."

That sounds useful. Let's see. In the meantime, after reading about Du's reduced international call charges, I noticed a couple more stories about operators slashing prices. Both relate to markets from where a large number of the UAE's expatriate workers originate.

According to an article last week on the Bangladesh news portal priyo.com, the CDMA operator CityCell is "struggling to remain in business... with operating losses escalating to almost double in the first quarter." The company, of which SingTel is the largest shareholder, has apparently suffered as a result of having to subsidise handsets. The article asserts that only market-leading
Grameenphone is profitable, "with other players bleeding for years."

While device subsidies are said to be hurting CityCell, greater pain is apparently being caused by an intense price war. Says Zia Uddin, an analyst with New York-based asset management company LR Global: "Intense competition has led to [an] unhealthy price war in [the] Bangladesh mobile phone market. Most of the companies have to subsidise handset prices to woo clients," he said. "In addition, the ARPU and [tariffs] in Bangladesh are possibly the lowest in the world".

CityCell, the country's first ever MNO, seems poorly positioned to grind it out in this kind of environment, having steadily lost market share to rival GSM operators since Grameenphone, Banglalink (then called Sheba Telecom) and AKTEL entered the market in 1997. The CDMA carrier now has just 4.03% of the subscriptions in Bangladesh.

Meanwhile in India, according to an story carried by Global Mobile Daily last month, the entry of CDMA operator Reliance Communications onto the GSM scene has already triggered rivals Airtel, Vodafone and Idea Cellular into price cutting mode.

This is not surprising if, as reported by the Economic Times yesterday, Reliance plans to slash its GSM rates by 50%. However, the same article cites a recent study by Lirneasia which deduces that such a move is not likely to make a significant dent in telcos' existing subscriber base.

Lirneasia, a not-for-profit ICT policy and regulation capacity building organisation working in nine South Asian countries, conducted a survey on mobile users at the bottom of the socioeconomic pyramid which shows that even the most cost sensitive subscriber segment has reached a stage where it is driven more by service offering, brand loyalty and number retention than by price discounts.

T.V. Ramachandran, head of India GSM operators' trade association the COAI supports the findings of the Lirneasia study. This seems like a sensible response from a body whose members could suffer badly if a price war is escalated and sustained.

It will be interesting to watch developed and emerging markets worldwide to see how many operators feel this economic downturn compels them to cut prices heavily and how many take the view outlined in the Lirneasia report - that it makes more sense to compete on quality and brand value.

Mobile price wars in the downturn: time to do battle?

Delays notwithstanding, 3G to outpace WiMAX in India

On Friday I spotted an article in the Economic Times which quoted a familiar name: Kunal Bajaj, the India MD of BDA, a consultancy business which originated as an advisory firm specializing in China's telecommunications, media and technology sector. Kunal was a very useful contributor to one of the first Com World Series events it was my pleasure to host while working with Informa Telecoms & Media - the COAI-endorsed GSM>3G India 2007 conference and exhibition in Mumbai.

This event, now known as India & South Asia Com was, in those days, a useful place for telecoms tech vendors to mingle with a large, senior and diverse crowd drawn from India's numerous mobile operators. The event has since become rather more than that, having grown simultaneously in two directions.

One of these directions, in common with all the equivalent Com World Series shows in other regions, is about extending the appeal of the conference beyond the cellular sector and into the wider telecoms world. At any Com World Series event now, you can expect to meet representatives of a very broad range of telcos: MNOs, incumbent and challenger wireline operators, cable MSOs and all kinds of broadband service providers. While it is true that the mix varies depending on the relative value of each of these segments in the part of the world concerned, I am ending my involvement in the Series with a sense that the team are doing an ever better job of providing the exhibitors and sponsors (largely tech vendors: network equipment, OSS/BSS etc.) with high-value one-stop-shops of potential customers from across huge regions. The tricky part is ensuring that the conference element is genuinely useful for the telcos' delegates, i.e. providing them with meaningful peer networking opportunities and insightful presentation material from genuinely influential speakers. I believe the Com World Series team pull off this trick remarkably well.

In the case of the Mumbai event, the other change which I was responsible for driving was to do with marketing the conference to delegates from India's neighbours across the rest of South Asia, namely the Maldives, Bhutan, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Pakistan.

Securing speakers and delegates from the last of these is not without challenges. One scarcely needs to be an especially diligent student of South Asian affairs to be aware of the tensions between Pakistan and India, two countries which have gone to war with each other three times since the partition of India in 1947. In terms of how these tensions have affected my work in that part of the world, I remember our team assisting the then-CEO of Pakistan's Ufone GSM, Mubashir Naqvi, whose participation we had secured as one of the key speakers. It was clear that the paperwork and delays around arranging a visit to India were rather more arduous for Pakistanis than for citizens of any other country. Along the way, I also realised that roaming agreements did not exist between mobile operators in the two countries, meaning that Pakistani visitors to the Mumbai conference would need to go to some trouble in order to keep in touch with colleagues and families back home.

These difficulties notwithstanding, I am convinced that Pakistani delegates can be attracted to the India & South Asia Com World Series event, even in the context of tensions raised yet higher by the November terrorist attacks on Mumbai. I noted in my end-of-year post on my former Com World Series blog that the timing of this terrible incident made a postponement of the India & South Asia Com 2009 unavoidable. The event was set to go ahead in January, and is now rescheduled for mid-May.

The main reason for my feeling sure that the Mumbai conference can successfully gather participants from all over South Asia is what I learned when I travelled to Bangladesh in July 2007 with the specific intention of gauging the appetite for a whole-region event. My trip to Dhaka took in a meeting of the South Asian GSM Forum and a conference which Informa Telecoms & Media ran in conjunction with Singapore-based colleagues at sister company IBC Asia. Dubbed Mobile South Asia, this event had previously been held in Sri Lanka and Pakistan as well as Bangladesh. The 2007 iteration, which I attended, seemed to be well-received by delegates from the operators, but it did prove rather harder to persuade sponsors that any of these venues would work well. That was part of why it seemed attractive for us to merge the Dhaka event into the Mumbai conference in 2008 and beyond. The Mumbai audience, when polled on site, were actively supportive of the move, but I travelled to Bangladesh less sure of whether the Mobile South Asia crowd would welcome being bundled together with their Indian colleagues. Again, I conducted a poll on site and came away feeling sure that the combined event would be successful. I would like to think that in my new role I will be able to attend this gathering, if not this year then at least in the not-too-distant future. I expect to see it evolving positively.

The article in which Kunal Bajaj's name cropped up concerns the idea that India's telecoms operators are worried that the further delay of 3G and WiMAX auctions (which I was writing about here on Friday) will significantly dampen the development of services. Kunal and his colleagues at BDA seem to be more optimistic. A report which they have prepared, in conjunction with the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI), predicts that by 2011, 25% of 3G revenues will come from non-voice services, a half of which will be data access. Kunal Bajaj says "while this seems like a modest estimate, it is to be noted that data comprises less than 1% of present 2G revenues."

I suppose BDA's estimate only appears modest to those who did not adjust their expectations down to realistic levels in the wake of relatively lacklustre 3G debuts in markets around the world. I remember a very good article written in 2006 by Neil Montefiore, who recently stood down as CEO of Singaporean cellco M1 after a stint of nearly thirteen years at the helm. Writing for the Informa Telecoms & Media Global Mobile fortnightly research service, Montefiore argued that "the basic problem with all technology lies in its marketing." He observed that "clever stuff is developed and launched and sometimes catches the imagination of the masses without too much effort from the marketing experts," and that "it's when the clever stuff gets complicated that the marketing becomes the catalyst for success, or the point of failure." Montefiore argued that when compared to products such as the iPod, SMS or mobile voice, "3G is a complex proposition... [requiring] new technology and new handsets [and enabling] the mobilization of familiar experiences." Montefiore noted that most operators had targeted 3G launches at the mass market, "focusing on expensive, high-profile content downloads and mobile TV", had spent significant sums on mass-media advertising, and had offered "huge voice-tariff incentives for people to switch to 3G." He observed that handset makers had launched wide "ranges of cheaper handsets in an effort to fire up the market, losing sight of the fact that the success of 3G is based on the sale of the service itself." This last point is surely familiar territory for us all. How many of us are currently using anything like the full range of functionalities offered by the mobile devices in our pockets? Perhaps it's even more pertinent to ask about the handsets in the pockets of our friends and family members who do not earn a living in the mobile sector.

Writing in 2006, Montefiore argued that "the results have been mixed, the adoption rate is slow and there is no mass-market take-up... because the mass market believes the hype and assumes the service will be as good as the advertising says it is." He insisted that "when the experience doesn't live up to the expectation, the momentum quickly dissipates" and that "ultimately, the marketers are trying to sell the service to the wrong people."

Montefiore argued that "as an industry, we need to relaunch 3G. We need to communicate specifically with early adopters and develop targeted marketing propositions to cater to their expectations. That means thinking outside the box in terms of media, looking at ways of reaching our target markets in a structured rather than scatter gun approach. It means treating 3G as a niche market with identifiable and quantifiable applications that have a value and purpose. We need to turn our perception of 3G on its head, stop treating it as the cure-all for falling ARPU by assuming that every user out there actually wants streaming video, and revert to proper, old-fashioned marketing by building a proper business case for its adoption."

My feeling is that these lessons have been learned in the two-and-a-half years since Neil Montefiore levelled his criticisms at operators and handset vendors. We are, finally, living in a mobile data market showing clear signs of explosive growth after years of slower progress. The Informa Telecoms & Media report, Mobile Networks Forecasts: Future Mobile Traffic, Base Stations and Revenues (published June 2008), quotes network vendor Ericsson as stating "that on the W-CDMA networks it has deployed worldwide, total data traffic overtook total voice traffic in May 2007" and that "by December 2007 total data traffic was 3.7 times the level of voice traffic."

In his article, Neil Montefiore argued that "the way to build a market for a new technology is surely to focus on the people who understand the way that technology evolves, who are excited by its potential and who are forgiving of its teething problems." He said that computing, Internet services, DVD, VCR, MP3 "all started as expensive, complicated, sometimes unreliable technologies, but the mass markets they enjoy today have been built on the belief and understanding of those early adopters who disregarded the hype and focused on the capabilities."

To me, drawing on my daily experiences of living in the UK, it seems intuitive to believe that the remarkable growth in data traffic reported by Ericsson has been driven more by tech-savvy/time poor business users of HSPA dongles than by trendy consumers playing with funky phones. Beyond people working in the industry, I still seem to know very few people with 3G handsets and even fewer who are using them to do anything very bandwidth-hungry. However, for MNOs looking for a return on their 3G network investments, we possibly should not suppose that the mobile phone form factor and consumer services will always contribute less than dongles and corporate data subscriptions. The Informa Telecoms & Media Non-SMS Data report (published June 2008) notes that even the 2G version of the iPhone has significantly boosted the take-up of mobile Internet browsing, citing the case of T-Mobile's German operation, which announced in 1Q08 that average mobile data consumption, mostly for mobile Internet browsing, was up to 30 times more than for users of other handsets. Maybe a disruptive player shaking up the devices market is one of the more significant factors moving us towards the tipping point for mass-market mobile data use.

Devices also get a mention in the Economic Times article in which we saw Kunal Bajaj being relatively bullish about mobile data in India. The article flags up doubts about the practicality of 3G arising from "the unaffordability of 3G-enabled devices in the market and the costs involved in setting up a 3G network." In the same piece, these concerns are swiftly dashed by COAI supremo T.V. Ramachandran: "Even though most 3G enabled phones in India today are priced above Rs.8000, LG has launched a $100 phone which is enabled for 3G services but does not have any multimedia capabilities. These will flood the Indian market for 3G voice services [once the spectrum auctions are concluded]." Ramachandran continues: "nearly all of the existing telecom networks, which have been set up in the past two years, are 3G enabled."

According to the article, Kunal Bajaj estimates it will take only six months to deal with the need to build the additional capacity building to run commercial 3G services on these networks.

The thrust of the Economic Times article is that the prospects for 3G in India are rather better than for WiMAX, hence the title of my blog entry. Remember that the spectrum issues which have delayed the onset of the 3G era in India have also affected those seeking to deploy WiMAX, so I would not expect to see a situation similar to the one I've heard described in the Russian Federation. There, the three leading mobile operators (MTS, Vimplecom and MegaFon) have rolled out 3G services in major cities but not in the nation's capital. As recently as December 12th, Global Mobile Daily was reporting that the rollout of commercial 3G services in Moscow faces further delay because the Russian military has not yet freed up UMTS frequencies. I have heard the argument that this frustrating 3G launch delay in the country's most lucrative market has created a window of opportunity for broadband providers offering WiMAX-enabled services and has been the catalyst for some fairly enthusiastic hyping of the prospects for WiMAX in Russia.

Not only will prospective Indian WiMAX deployers not gain from any significant first-mover advantage, Friday's Economic Times article also makes the case for how 3G enjoys two advantages over the rival access technology, one of which is probably true worldwide, the other of which has to do with the specifics of the Indian market.

The first of these points in favour of 3G is that "there is no such truly affordable counterpart [of the above-mentioned low-cost 3G phones] available for accessing WiMAX." The second concerns market maturity. "National penetration of mobile telephony," the article states, "is expected to cross 50% through 3G in 2011, thrice as fast as it would with 2G, as the capacity of a 3G network is thrice more than that of a 2G equivalent." The argument goes that whereas in developed countries 3G was developed only when 2G penetration was saturated and telcos wanted to grow their revenues through more value added services (VAS), the case is very different in India. Says Kunal Bajaj: "In India, we are already on a 2.5G platform in terms of technology; but our services are still poorly developed owing to spectrum constraints. In this context, 3G will definitely mean better voice services and data access for the first time in many segments, rather than increase in other VAS."

This is not to suggest there is no business case for WiMAX in India. I think I understand from the Economic Times article that Government policy has a place for WiMAX, favouring the technology as a provider of data access, particularly for last mile connectivity in rural areas. Additionally, the BDA report says that "WiMAX is expected to be used for fixed residential and enterprise broadband access in cities."

This all makes it sound as if there is a reasonable case for WiMAX and a stronger one for 3G in India. Let's see.

Delays notwithstanding, 3G to outpace WiMAX in India

GSM vs. CDMA: the battle goes on?

One of the most rewarding aspects of being part of Informa Telecoms & Media's Com World Series team was having the opportunity to learn about regions which I had not previously studied or visited. Previously, while creating and hosting telecoms sector conferences for other companies, my travels had taken me to North America, Central & Eastern Europe and to Russia. My Com World Series brief took me further afield. In addition to already familiar territory, regions I covered in the Informa role included the Middle East , India/South Asia and Latin America.

In the last of these regions, my visits began at what felt like the relatively advanced stages of a protracted cellular network standard battle between the GSM and CDMA camps. A key partner in the delivery of the GSM Americas/Americas Com events in which I was involved was 3G Americas, an association founded in 2002, with a mission to unite "mobile operators and manufacturers in the Americas to provide a single voice to represent the GSM family of wireless technologies – GSM, GPRS, EDGE, and UMTS/HSDPA."

The 3G Americas President, Chris Pearson and the association's Latin America Director Erasmo Rojas led an Executive Briefing session at each of the Americas Com conferences delivered under my watch. They did a great job of rounding up CxO-level participants from key South American MNOs. I don't think they would mind me saying that on both occassions Chris's opening presentation really banged the drum for the GSM family in terms of describing advantages over rival standards.

I cannot be sure to what extent 3G Americas has been instrumental to the Western Hemisphere's migration away from CDMA technology in favour of the GSM flavour, but that migration has been significant. The graphic below, taken from the 3G Americas website (and drawn from Informa Telecoms & Media WCIS figures), shows how GSM has prevailed in the opening years of this new century:

It is worth pointing out that the non-GSM subscriptions are now, for the most part, in North America. In the USA and Canada, it is estimated that there currently exist around 153 million CDMA connections. GSM subscriptions across these two markets number around 104 million and W-CDMA lines have just reached the 20 million mark.

Looking further south, Informa Telecoms & Media estimated that in the 'Americas' region (all markets in the Western Hemisphere except the USA and Canada), there were almost 400 million GSM subscriptions and just 40.6 million CDMA subscriptions by the end of December 2008. Of these CDMA lines, the two most significant chunks were the 11.7 million connections in Brazil and the 15.8 million in Venezuela. In the case of Brazil, a single operator, Vivo, accounts for all the CDMA subscriptions.

When I looked up these figures today, I was a little surprised that Vivo, a joint Telefónica-Portugal Telecom operation, still has so many subscribers on its CDMA network. The last time I was looking closely at developments at Vivo, which was back in about May 2008, I was under the impression the company planned to shift all of its CDMA mobile subscribers to its newer GSM network. That process is certainly happening - but at nothing like the speed I imagined.

In Venezuela, the vast majority of the CDMA connections are owned by renationalised Movilnet, which has an estimated 11.3 million subscribers - vs. the 4.5 million CDMA connections of rival Movistar. Unlike Movilnet, the Telefónica-backed Venezuelan MNO has been steadily shifting users to a GSM network since March 2006. However, the state-owned cellco is also, finally, making the move to GSM. In December last year, Global Mobile Daily reported that billing vendor Amdocs has deployed a billing solution to support Movilnet's new GSM network.

We can therefore expect continuing developments in Latin America to impact upon the next version of the above graphic. Look out for further erosion in the non-GSM networks' share of Western Hemisphere mobile subscriptions.

One might infer from all of this that CDMA is a technology in quick decline towards an inevitable demise. However, recent news items from India lead me to believe that the GSM-CDMA battle is very much a live one in that country.

Earlier this week, I spotted that Sistema Shyam TeleServices is potentially looking at more acquisitions in order to gain better access to the Indian market. The company, a joint venture between majority shareholder Sistema of Russia and India's Shyam Group, was among operators to get new licences in early 2008. The nascent cellco is aiming to offer CDMA-based mobile services across the country before the middle of 2010. A Business Line/Hindu Group article dated Jan 30th quotes Vsevolod Rozanov, President and CEO, Sistema Shyam TeleServices, who says "We are open to any opportunities for acquiring a mobile services company in India to speed up our roll out plans. However, there are not too many CDMA operators in the country who are looking to sell their business." Asked specifically about well-established CDMA MNO Reliance Communications, Rozanov said, "Yes we can look at Reliance’s business if they are willing to sell. However, I do not think that is the case." According to the article Reliance was, at some unspecified recent time "considering a merger deal with South Africa-based telecom player MTN."

When the full gravity of the global economic downturn started to become clear to us all last year, I sensed that one casualty might be the international expansion plans of Russia's leading telecoms groups. In that context, Sistema's apparent willingness to spend money on growing its Indian CDMA operation suggests to me not only confidence in the Indian market but also a belief that the CDMA standard is up to the task of supporting attractive, well-priced and future-proof services.

Another sign that CDMA is to be taken seriously in India is the recent, strongly worded response of the COAI (Cellular Operators' Association of India) to reported plans on the part of one operator to make EV-DO data cards available on the market. The COAI is a club of GSM operators, a group that must surely be frustrated by the ongoing delays in the licensing of spectrum for 3G and WiMAX services. Telecoms.com reported today that having already put the spectrum auctions off until this year, because of the government's failure to clear the relevant radio spectrum in all operating regions ('circles' in the local jargon), new delays are anticipated in the wake of proposals to double the base price of the licences.

India's GSM players, then, are clearly concerned about being outpaced by CDMA operators. An article in yesterday's Economic Times says that COAI Director General T.V. Ramachandran has written to the country's telecoms Minister to seek assurances that no private player should be allowed to launch EV-DO service without 3G being made available to all players. The article states that according to the COAI, the launch of EV-DO services would be unfair to the GSM operators as "CDMA operators have ample spectrum to offer both 2G as well as 3G services and this can result in [giving] unfair anti-competitive advantage to CDMA and tilt the playing field to the disadvantage of the private GSM operators".

I daresay Mr Ramachandran and his colleagues will make a strong and persuasive case. During my stint running the Com World Series Indian event I had the pleasure of meeting the COAI Director General several times. One memory stands out. In 2007 I was asked to have lunch with Mr Ramachandran and his guests from various Indian government agencies at the conference. One of the guests, on agreeing with a point made by the COAI head, gave me a useful piece of advice about keeping tabs on telco sector developments in India. "If you want to know," said my neighbour at the lunch table, "watch T.V." I will indeed keep an eye out for more on this story. I am interested to see if the COAI can indeed prevail in their argument that EV-DO gives CDMA operators an unfair advantage over GSM operators struggling with further delays to their own 3G plans.

All of this makes me look back and smile at a very simplistic remark made to me years ago by one of my first bosses at a telecoms sector conference company. It was one of his tasks to set me on the path of cutting through the then-forbidding tangle of telco jargon. "CDMA is dead," he told me. "You only need to worry about GSM". I don't think that can have been true then given that it's abundantly clear that it's not correct even now.

GSM vs. CDMA: the battle goes on?