Mobility - social, economic and physical

When you read about mobile adoption and penetration, it's just numbers. It doesn't necessary mean anything real. But here's an observation as my Christmas and New Year break in India draws to a close... when I I last came out to India three years ago, the inlaws all had mobiles, but that was about it. We swapped mobile numbers, showed the aunts how to send an SMS and thought all was good.

However, now not only do all the inlaws have mobiles (and some of them have a Blackberry as well), but so do the servants and drivers! Now if you want a cup of tea, you don't shout out (or worse still actually get up off the chair you're lounging in!), you just phone one of the servants on their prepaid mobiles. When you're in the city and arranging with the driver when to pick you up (parking is a nightmare), no longer are you saying "see you back here in two hours" ... now you just take their number, give them a missed call to makesure you entered it right, and head off on the basis that you can just summon them when needed.

As if that's not enough, the roaming charges are also seeing people using multiple SIMs. Once you are 'out of station' (for example, you live in Bangalore but are in Calcutta for a couple of weeks for a family wedding as was the case for us), you just pop a local prepaid SIM into your phone so the innumerable wedding planning calls flying about are all at the local rate. In-country roaming is, therefore, also inflating subscriber numbers. Similarly the variation in coverage meaning that a phone that works well in the jungle of Tamil Nadu (typically CDMA WLL) isn't the best phone for use in the metropolis of Bangalore where GSM dominates, and vice versa.

The challenge, one suspects, will be in the success of operators in moving subscribers from prepaid to contract and in building a genuinely national mobile phone network where one phone and one SIM really will be all that people need. So while subscription numbers in total will continue to rise, a key metric to track will be the number of contracts a subscriber has, and the proportion of prepaid therein.

India ... some good news on a bad news day

While the world's attention is focused on the shocking events in Mumbai, it's easy to be drawn into a spiral of doom and gloom. India is a country I know well and love even more. A country full of diversity in all the best and worst that that implies. But it's richness is something one can't deny.

The potential of the country is similarly unarguable.

The Telecoms Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) has just announced that 10.42 million mobile subscribers were added in October alone. This follows on from 10+ million in September and over 9 million in August ... making a staggering 92.1 million new mobile subscribers in 2008 so far and a total of well over 325 million nationally.

It's easy to see both why the likes of Vodafone and Telenor are making big moves on the market ... and on the flip side why behemoths like Tata are now undisputed global companies.

Ultra-low cost handsets will undoubtedly further drive the unquenchable growth in Indian mobile subscribers. But is that enough? Is it enough to just add more and more subscribers ... especially when the ARPU per subscriber is going to get ever smaller as less well off communities become connected?

India, however, can also give us much to learn about mobile content ... a continent with such a passion for music, where Bollywood stars make the Hello Magazine faces of the West seem anonymous in comparison; with such a passion for sport, where cricketers are not only megastars in the true definition of the word but are reinventing a sport and, despite the poverty in parts of the country, contributing over 70 percent of the money in the sport globally ... such a market is going to offer up rich potential for mobile content.

Well, provided the networks can cope, the pricing and business models make sense, and the right sort devices are in the hands of subscribers.

So, while there is understandable concern about the recent violence in Mumbai (and don't get me started on that ... Indian history and politics is my first love and I could wax lyrical for hours!) the potential of India remains undimmed.