(5 July 2008 5:30 pm)

NEW DELHI: Digitalisation is seeing slow growth in India. The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) has said the number of set-top boxes (STBs) installed in the Cas (conditional access system) notified areas of Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata and Chennai has increased to 607883 at the quarter ending March 2008. This is a 6.14 per cent growth from the 572706 STBs installed at the end of quarter December 2007.

Trai has also said that the maximum number of free-to-air (FTA) channels being carried in the cable TV networks are 133. This is based on the data received from the various multi-system operators (MSOs) across the country.

Out of 114 pay channels as reported by 17 broadcasters and their distributors at the end of the quarter ending March 2008, a maximum 94 pay channels are being carried in a cable networks.

Meanwhile, apart from All India Radio, there were 205 FM Radio stations in operation as on March 31 2008. During the quarter ending March 2008, 28 private FM radio stations came into operation.

No DTH license was issued during the quarter ending March 2008. Therefore, at present, apart from the FTA DTH service of Doordarshan (DD Direct Plus), there are six private DTH licensees. Out of these 6 licensees, three licensees (Dish TV, Tata Sky and Sun Direct) are offering pay DTH services to the customers as on 31 March, 2008 while others are in the process of rolling out their services.

There were 47 community radio station licensees and out of these, 28 were operational in the quarter ending December 2007. In the quarter ending March 2008, two more licenses were issued and seven new community radio stations became operational. So in the quarter ending March 2008, out of 49 licensees of community radio stations, 35 stations are operational.

According to the Trai report, the number of Internet subscribers have increased to 11.09 million while the broadband subscriber base touched 3.87 million at the end of March 2008.

At present, 72 Internet Service Providers (ISPs) are providing broadband services. Out of these, only 13 Service Providers are having subscriber base of more than 10,000 subscribers each and these service providers share the 98.77 per cent of total subscriber base in this quarter. The Trai report covers performance of 13 broadband service providers vis-à-vis the QoS (quality of service) benchmarks prescribed by the regulator.

The wireless market has grown by 11.75 per cent with addition of 27.45 million subscribers for the quarter ending March 2008.

The total subscriber base of the wireline and wireless services reaches 300.48 million for the quarter ending March 2008 as against 272.87 million for the quarter ending December 2007, thus registering an increase of 10.12 per cent during the quarter.

The tele-density for the quarter ending March 2008 reached 26.22 as compared to 23.87 for the quarter ending December 2007. The subscriber base for wireless services has increased from 233.62 million for the quarter ending December 2007 to 261.07 million for quarter ending March 2008. Subscriber base of wireline service has increased from 39.25 million for the quarter ending December 2007 to 39.41 million for the quarter ending March 2008.

Internet wireline subscribers reaches 11.09 million for the quarter ending March 2008 as compared to 10.36 million during the previous quarter registering a growth of approximately 7.08 per cent. There are 66.09 million wireless Internet subscribers (capable of accessing Internet through mobile handset (GSM/ CDMA)) for the quarter ending March 2008. Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd (BSNL) has retained its top position and reported a subscriber base of nearly 5.64 million Internet subscribers against 4.99 million at the end of last quarter.

The number of broadband subscribers (with a download speed of 256 Kbps or more) is 3.87 million for the quarter ending March 2008 as against 3.13 million for the previous quarter. The growth rate of broadband subscribers in this quarter is 23.64 per cent.

The average revenue per user (ARPU) for dial-up Internet subscribers is Rs 220 for the quarter ending March 2008. The Minutes of Usage for dial-up access per subscriber/month is 220 minutes.