It’s really surprising to see the sudden dip in GSM telecom subscriber figures for month of Aug 2012. In July alone, India added 1.7 million subscribers and month prior, the figure was healthy 4.7 million additions. Then where did 7.1 million subscribers go all of a sudden in Aug?
Possibly there’re three ways to explain this. Either this is some statistical error at first place. We must wait for Sep stats to release to conclude. Or customers really vanish or decided to throw their GSM mobile phones for no good reason to justify. Or they must have entirely migrated to 3G/4G. Is it? But 7.1 million people? That’s not small number to ignore.
Even the new telcos like Uninor might find it hard to digest the fact of losing 2.3 million subscribers alone in month of Aug. Leading GSM Operators like Idea, Vodafone & Airtel have lost 4.5 million subscribers in total. So in all, these 4 cellular operators form 95{af589cdba9d77786c8c861317dbad60bba1e2ebbf56e2ffab874a1b59fde9ce3} of subscriber loss in month of Aug. But then who is gaining? Are CDMA players enjoying this game? Let’s look at some 3G Stats available.
India has approx 137 million 3G subscribers (including WCDMA,EVDO, CDMA-1x/2000) as on July 2012. Of which, DoCoMo & Reliance respectively have highest chunk of 88 million 3G Subscribers. This is followed by MTS (15 million), BSNL (10 million), Airtel (9 million), Vodafone (6 million) & Idea (2.25 million). Rest goes to Aircel.
So the loss of GSM subscribers came at cost of 3G additions? Possibly! But nothing to worry about it much. As 2G technology life cycle has reached to saturation and much to decline, we must expect 3G to gain from loss in coming days. The early adopters might have push the inflection point near to 3G additions earlier.
One thing is clear, this loss of GSM subscribers should come at cost of some gain somewhere, which we can’t talk about it right now.Let’s wait for Sep 2012 stats to release.
