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To: sea_biscuit who wrote (112927)	2/10/2002 2:19:39 PM
From: slacker711	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 152472

The only way you can get a lot more people to use cell phones is to give them away for free. Otherwise, you will have at best an anemic growth rate in cell phone ownership. Well....the statistics are proving you wrong. The growth rate for January was around 5%. Do they give the scooters and the TV's in India away for free? Check the statistics on the total number of users for each of these items in India... A lot of people that I worked with told me that they don't want the hassles of owning a cellphone when there are so many pay phones around ("You stumble on the street, and the chances are that you will hit a payphone booth", was the expression one of them used). People used to say that in the US....and just about every other country in the world as well. At this point, India would have to be the exception to the global rule of cell-phone growth. Not very likely.... Slacker

To: sea_biscuit who wrote (112927)	2/10/2002 4:09:27 PM
From: arun gera	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 152472

Dipy: You make some good points. The phone booths you talk about did not exist 12 years ago. So 12 years ago you might have said that India had no demand or buying power for making phone calls. And now you see these telephone booths everywhere. That is the proof that the demand exists. Do you know that 12-15 years ago one had to wait for years to get a phone connection in India? 12-15 years ago, one could use a credit card only in the most exclusive places such as five-star hotels. Now credit cards are accepted just about everywhere. Around 1985, a US Citizen of Indian origin, Sam Pitroda, who had gotten very rich by selling his Silicon Valley company, decided that he wanted to do something for his former country. He got the political blessing of the Central Government and became the head of CDOT (Center for Development of Telematics). At that point, most telephone exchanges in India were not electronic and telephone calls to huge areas in India could only be made through an operator (trunk-call, as it was known in India). In my younger days, when the phone rang and the operator said that it was a trunk-call, one feared that something bad had happened. Because inter-city calls were so rare. Anyway, CDOT's immediate objectives were to upgrade the telephone exchanges all across the nation and also to populate the country with phone booths. This was one of the few projects that the Indian Govt. did very well. CDOT originally tried to develop in-house technology, some of my bright friends joined the organization. In the end, I think they ended up with a mix of in-house and external technology. The end-result was that the phone exchanges were upgraded in the last 10 years to become electronic. Also, the government came up with an innovative leasing and metering program for manned booth operation. Hundreds of thousands of underemployed youths spent about $10,000 for each manned booth. Of course, everybody jumped onto the same bandwagon and now there is a saturation of these booths. I think this case-study of manned phoned booth can be a classic case-study for students of third-world development. How to harness the untapped energy of the underemployed population. A govt. body has a mission and provides a clear path. But the capital investment and entrepreneurship comes from ordinary people. A similar example is the Cable industry in India. Suddenly around 1990, Cable started sprouting all over India. The programming was beamed from outside India. Local operators were again underemployed youth, who started wiring the neighborhood with Cable. They provided the capital and the entrepreneurship. By the late 1990s, Cable subscribers reached 10-20 million. >Another thing I noticed is that there are so many pay phones on the Indian streets that, in some places, you can literally jump from one payphone booth to another. >> >A lot of people that I worked with told me that they don't want the hassles of owning a cellphone when there are so many pay phones around ("You stumble anywhere on a city street, and chances are that you will hit a payphone booth", was the expression one of them used).> What you say is true. In fact the phone-booth person will even receive a phone call for you and send a person next door to knock on your door. In a way, it is good. Once people are used to using the phone services for personal or business use, then they will be more ready for a wireless phone. I remember in 1980 when TVs were not all that common in India, people would watch television at their neighbor's houses. Not in the 1990s. Everybody wants their own, even in the slums.