Filed under: assignement, digital economic, Mobile Technology&Communication
In the mobile communication class I take in this quarter, we often talk about those cool and powerful mobile applications we have today. However, all these enthusiasm are based on these important hypothesis that we love mobile technology, we always ask for more from our mobile phones and most importantly, we are able and love to pay for expensive handsets and services fee.
However, this is aparently not the case in India.
“India’s state-owned BSNL, which the government allowed to launch 3G a year ago, now offer services in 300 cities, has just 700,000 customers, and has cut tarrifs at least twice.”, says Mehul Srivastava, the senior journalist in Business Week.
This is really bad for the operator considering that they had spent billions of dollars to bid on 3G spectrum and to build the nation wide network.
what even worse is that Indians not only do not appreciate 3G services, they simply don’t like the idea of “mobile net”. According to the Internet&Mobile Association of India, Of Indian’s 530 million-plus mobile subscribers, only 2 million regularly use the mobile Net, mostly to download pictures of cricket players and Bollywood stars.
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Great different perspective Ziwen! Indeed, we could feel that in non-US areas, applications are not as popular as here in US. Many reasons are involved, such as different living styles, carriers are not settled completely, different user experiences, etc. I’m thinking that if carriers/operators really want to enter the market, they need to develop more localization applications. Yet I agree that most time, the technology goes too fast while the whole society is not ready to embrace and learn.
Comment by verasays March 10, 2010 @ 5:20 am