India is still a laggard in telecom usage and there are a lot of opportunities in scaling up existing infrastructure. The scale-up operations offer huge career opportunities at every level, said Dr V. Sridhar, Research Fellow, Sasken Communication Technologies.
Delivering a lecture ‘Telecom industry and the associated career opportunities' organised by the Business Line Club and sponsored by Syndicate Bank for the students of the Indian Institute of Planning and Management (IIPM), Dr Sridhar said, “The fixed line (government owned BSNL & MTNL) subscriber base is stable and not growing at all.
“It is in the Indian mobile telephony which has seen a tremendous growth from 1995. Since then, we have grown to be 800 million subscribers, second largest after China.”
Data usage
As far as the telecom usage goes, it is the highest in the world with average airtime rate less than a cent per minute - one of the lowest in the world.
In the mobile data usage, India is still lagging behind the western countries in technology usage. But there is a good opportunity ahead.
With high usage levels, India is one of the highly competitive markets in the world. Mobile telephone companies operating in Indian market are clocking EBITA between 25 per cent and 43 per cent.
“In the Indian telecom space, we have nine GSM and three CDMA operators. In terms of size, we are more than twice compared to Finland 165 minutes,” said Dr Sridhar.
Subscriber base
Indian telecom network has about 800 million connections and about 15 million connections are being added every month.
Mobile subscriber base globally is 5.8 billion and is expected to reach 7.4 billion by 2015. Of which, the Asia-Pacific region contributes to about 48 per cent of the market. On the mobile broadband user level it is 720 million and is expected to touch 1.5 billion by 2015.
Career opportunities
Dr Sridhar giving value chain analysis of the telecom sector said there is career opportunities at every level such as telecom network equipment manufactures, handset makers (Nokia, Micromax), cellular operators (Airtel, Idea, Vodaphone), infrastructure providers, content providers (Onmobile), systems integrators (IBM and HP), software application developers, government regulators (Trai) and policy makers of the country (like the Ministry of Communication and IT).
In addition, emerging areas are telemedicine and mobile healthcare, mobile enterprises solution, mobile location and travel services, telepresence and conferencing, tele-education and mobile education, connected homes solutions, telemetry and energy management, telematics in vehicles, entertainment, telematics cloud services, m-commerce.
In this emerging sector, management students can play key role as strategy analysts, business analysts, leading sales and marketing teams, consumer and the retail market, original equipment makers, in telecom R&D services, technology and business consultants, programme managers for executing telecom projects, need inter-disciplinary skills and motivating to learn rapidly evolving technologies, industry and market structure.
In India, rural tele-density is 30 per cent (70 per cent do not have single phone) whereas in the urban area it is 130 per cent (more than one connection) hence, there is opportunity for companies to grow.
“The fast-changing landscape is offering India a chance to leapfrog in technology adoption from first generation to fourth generation in short time,” said Dr Sridhar.