There I was standing in line one day to pay my mobile phone bill at India’s largest cell phone service provider and I started to wonder at the great Indian mobile phone industry. I recall the first ever cell phone call I made in 1996 which had cost me Rs. 16 then plus taxes for a minute and it had been a local call then and those were the prices. Today for that much money I could probably speak for 26 minutes at a paisa (less than a cent) per second. Which brings us to the average revenue per user or ARPU in the telecom industry terminology and we at India have the lowest in the world. The graphic below shows the comparative ARPU figures for the world and the only place that is lower is Brazil – which by the way has a population of 191 million only. The…
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