Soon we will all be nomads, telecom experts say. Looking at the pace at which the mobile communication revolution is spreading, this may not be an exaggeration. Last October the International Telecommunication Union at its Telecom 99 Meet at Geneva brought out a World Telecom Development Report in which the pride of place was given to Mobile Cellular Telephone.
"The growth of mobile cellular communications has been spectacular" says Mr. Yoshio Utsumi. In 1990 there were only 11 million mobile cellular subscribers. Now there are an estimated 500 million. Every day more than 250,000 people sign up for mobile cellular service. At the present growth pace, subscriber base doubles every 20 months.
In fact, the growth of mobile cellular subscribers is faster than that of fixed telephone subscribers. The estimate is that by 2003 while the fixed telephone subscribers would be around one billion, the number of mobile cellular subscribers may exceed that number. In 1998, for which firm figures are available, world-wide 100 million new subscribers were added to the mobile cellular services while only 50 million new subscribers were added to the fixed telephone service.
To dismiss this mobile revolution as a phenomenon confined to industrialised countries, is to ignore the reality. In fact, it is in developing countries that the mobile revolution is finding new uses and faster subscriptions. Take a poor country like Cambodia. In this war ravaged country with a population of just 10.3 million, mainly farmers, the mobile cellular phone density is 0.57 while land based fixed telephone density is only 0.23, less than even half. In other words, there are more mobile phones than fixed telephones.
"The spread of mobile communications has happened so rapidly that serious questions are being posed about the viability of expanding the fixed network, despite the fact that Cambodia has one of the lowest tele-densities in the world", says the ITU report. Despite the slump in 1998, the developing world’s share of global mobile subscribers has risen from under five per cent in 1990 to more than 20 per cent by end of 1998.
The growth in India has not been less spectacular. There are over 1 million subscribers for mobile service in the country today and the number is rapidly growing. The expectation is that there will be 2.5 million subscribers in another few months and may be 7.5 million by 2004 or 2005. The mobile has become popular not only among business executives but also among doctors, lawyers and other professionals as well as traders, small businesses, transporters etc. who are always on the move and need to be in touch or be contacted by their clients, customers and others. The idea of the mobile as an elitist status symbol remained only for a short time. Today it has become an essential tool for the people on the move.
The private sector mobile service operators in the telecom circles have wisely made the service available first along the national and state highways. This is enabling the people moving from one city to another to be constantly in touch with their base or trading centres or hospitals, patients, clients etc. Taking advantage of the availability of the service along the highways, villages alongside are also getting the service. Some of the operators are providing non-peak hour mobile service at as cheap a rate as Rs two per minute which is proving quite affordable for better off farmers to contact markets or urban centres nearby. Some 3500 villages are now served with mobile telephones.
Though the normal cost of mobile service is almost six times that of the fixed telephone service, the economic advantage of person to person contact is making the service popular. With the introduction of pre-paid cards on mobile cellular telephones, the subscriber now has a control over the cost of the service to him. This has added to the popularity. In many cities in this country and almost in all industrialised countries abroad, you could rent a cellular phone from the airport or railway station onwards. The pre-paid card has made the cellular phone a commodity you can buy off the shelf like you buy your shirt or soft drink.
The latest development in this mobile era is the ability to access data besides voice on the mobile phone. What is called Wireless Access Protocol (WAP) is promising to bring the benefits of Internet to the mobile telephone. New type of cellular phones with greater display area and other features are coming into the market. WAP would enable professions and business executives to be in constant touch with their base stations, access files, send faxes or receive them and virtually turn the mobile cellular phone into an office on the move.
To facilitate this the ITU is formulating what is called the Third Generation System : the International Mobile Telecommunications (IMT-2000). The international protocol would enable world-wide connectivity for Internet on the mobile cellular phone, by incorporating high speed communications as well as numerous other multi-media capabilities.
The ITU report says that if mobile operators and equipment manufacturers could address the problems of such connectivity and provision of broadband services on a global basis, then access to the service could become cheaper. And the cheaper it becomes, more accessible to the poor the service would be.
Even otherwise, in some developing countries like Bangladesh and in many poorer pockets in South Africa, the mobile phone has become a popular means of communication. In Bangladesh illiterate women have taken up mobile cellular phone based PCOs as a economic proposition, renting it out for others to get in touch with urban areas and also with relations abroad. Considering the cost of landline to remote places, wireless access is a viable proposition. Experts say over the years the distinction between wireless and fixed phone would go away and the two would work in tandem helping people to be on the move and yet be in touch with one another. "There are few reasons why telecommunications cannot be turned into a mass market product in developing countries" points out Mr. Utsumi.
The intensification of competition in the mobile market is helping to make the service cheaper. In Singapore, for instance, the telecom regulators have deliberately introduced a third operator ahead of time to force greater competition. In India, the MTNL in the two metros of Delhi and Mumbai and the Department of Telecom Services in the rest of the country is planning launch of their cellular service this year. They will thus form the third operator, bringing greater pressure on improved service as well as lower charges. This is already happening in Internet with several competing licensees lowering charges and offering different combination of services.
Meanwhile the expansion of the basic telephone service has now surpassed the earlier target of 20 million lines set for the year 2000. Teledensity is nearly 2.5 now and is expected to reach seven by 2005. The private sector has not been able to fulfil its targets in this area and the DTs continues to expand at the rate of over four million lines every year. However, nearly 40 per cent of the six lakh villages remain without a telephone connection which is the weak spot in our telecom expansion. The ideal of universal access will remain a distant dream so long as these villages lack even a reliable connection. Government has now set a target date of 2002 to provide at least one connection to all villages and DTS experts say with the recent developments in wireless Local Loop technology it would be possible to reach this target using wireless extension from fixed telephone exchanges.
The great divide between the urban and rural areas in communication is not an Indian phenomenon alone. While new developments like Internet on wireless phones are all set to roll over the world, it is a harsh reality that over half the world is yet to make a telephone call. With just over one billion telephone lines in the world and a tele-density of 16.45 in year 2000, more people are without a telephone connection in the vicinity than there are subscribers. The Communication Divide stares us in the face. In Africa, tele-density is expected to be only 2.53 this year and in Asia only 9.91. There is, therefore, a great leeway to be made. The World Telecom Day on May 17 is meant to remind us that this divide must be bridged soon as telecom is now critical to economic growth.
To speed up that job, Governments have to adopt policies that would promote investment in telecommunication, improve competitive environment and institute regulatory regimes that provide level playing fields for investors. That exactly was the reason why the telecom policy of 94 was replaced by NTP 99 and the earlier regulatory regime by a more effective one this year. The surge of investor confidence since then is reflected in the rush of growth of cellular subscribers and onrush of Internet firms, the rising market value of infotech shares etc. As the next big deregulation takes place, namely the opening of the National Long Distance, expectations are running high.
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