India calling: 15 min/day

Indians are now talking much more on their mobile phones than the Singaporeans, Chinese, Malaysians and Australians.

On average, each Indian mobile subscriber spends around 15 minutes every day on the phone, according to the latest data from the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai).

In comparison, according to figures based on various researches, including those by PricewaterhouseCoopers, the Chinese use the mobile phone for only nine minutes, while the Singaporeans use it for over 10 minutes a day. Australians use it for less than four minutes, Malaysians for around six minutes and the Thais seven minutes a day.

The growing use of the mobile phone compares favourably with the time Indians spend in other areas like reading newspapers (19 minutes a day), surfing the Internet (less than seven minutes for dial up users) or watching TV news channels (over seven minutes a day, according to TAM Media Research) However, the average time spent by an individual watching TV is two-and-a-half hours a day.

More importantly, the minutes of use for mobile phones have grown by 38 per cent in the last 18 months from just over 10 minutes a day at the end of 2004.

This is due to two factors: in 2003 the government made incoming calls free under a new regime; and tariffs have dropped by nearly half in the last two years, making them the cheapest worldwide.

"The big push in use of minutes came with the move towards lifetime free incoming calls offered by operators. That was a potent attraction," said TV Ramachandran, director-general of the Cellular Operators' Association of India. Last December, virtually every operator offered free lifetime incoming calls to woo customers.

The use of minutes is clearly skewed in favour of incoming calls, meaning that the revenue an operator accrues as termination charge is very small compared with what it can earn from an outgoing call.

The fall in tariff, with the large incoming minutes, is the reason why the average revenue per user for operators has not gone up despite increase in use.

For instance, according to the Trai data, the ratio between incoming and outgoing calls for CDMA operators is 57:43. In the case of GSM, the total outgoing time is 179 minutes a month (of a total use of 414 minutes).