An Industry where companies are "primarily engaged in operating, maintaining, and/or providing access to facilities for the transmission of voice, data, text, sound, and video" is known as Telecommunications Industry. Hence, Telecom Service Providers are organizations which provide the aforementioned services through the land-line and wireless networks. (http://www.bitpipe.com/tlist/Telecommunications-Industry.html)
Goldman Sachs research says, "India will overtake US by 2050" and the reasons for these predictions are India's increased openness to trade, investment in information and communication technology, and greater financial deepening.
(http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/India_to_overtake_United_States_by_2050_Report/articleshow/1411052.cms).
These structural changes have had a positive impact on the telecommunications sector so far. The Indian is the fifth largest telecom market in the world meeting up with global standards, (www.iimcal.ac.in/community/consclub/reports/telecom.pdf) but it still remains one of the lowest penetrated markets, and given the string of fovourable and sustainable economic growth, India remains one of the most attractive telecom markets in the world. (http://www.capitaline.com/user/FramePage.asp?id=1)
The gross telephony subscribers : 183.53 million (November 2006)
Teledensity : 16.60% (November 2006)
(http://www.capitaline.com/user/FramePage.asp?id=1)
1. Key Players:
There are three types of players in telecom services:
State owned companies (BSNL and MTNL)
Private Indian owned companies (Reliance Infocomm, Tata Teleservices,)
Foreign invested companies (Hutchison-Essar, Bharti Tele-Ventures, Escotel, Idea Cellular, BPL Mobile, Spice Communications)
2. Division: The Indian Telecom Industry can be divided into two main categories on the basis of technology:
i) Fixed Line-
Total subscriber base of fixed (Wireline) lines stood at 40.48 million (September, 2006).
The