Dealing With The Chicken And Egg Situation

The Indian Mobile Value Added Services (MVAS) is expected to touch a whopping $9.5 billion by the end of year 2015 according to a report by IT major Wipro.

The industry stood at $4.9 billion in the year 2012 according to International Data Corporation (IDC). Thanks to the smart device penetration which has witnessed a bulky growth recently after the Indian handset makers joined the bandwagon with the introduction of affordable handsets.

The figures though promising posses a deceptiveness from the perspective of the country’s entire 1.25 billion population as the number of mobile internet users in the country counts as low as 15 percent of the total population.

The primary reason for this huge untapped figure concludes to lack of a consistent network coverage and the availability of pocket friendly smart devices which despite the emergence of local players in the market still do not match up the budgets of Rural India.

The two factors are also interdependent as without a proper network infrastructure there can’t be a traction in the adoption of smart devices and vice versa.

So what should be the foremost agenda for the industry players- To build a connected infrastructure or to stress on the momentum of device penetration?

To get a hint of the answer we need to take a leap back in the history when there was no electricity and soon after its invention there was a flood of devices generating power from the energy source.

In order to save the smart devices from losing their  ‘smartness’, prevalence of a  consistent high speed network is a necessity without which the entire initiative to build a smart connected India as well as the enormous figures reflecting the growth of the device penetration are bound to end up in vain.