Manoj Kohli - CEO of Indian mobile market-leader Bharti Airtel - this morning said that mobile broadband is set to become a key driver of growth in India’s mobile market following the long-awaited award of 3G licenses in the country early next year. “Wireless broadband will be a major source of growth for the next five years,” Kohli told delegates in his keynote address. “DSL is too expensive so wireless broadband will be a great success and will overtake [DSL] in the next two to three years.” He added that he expects Bharti to switch on its first HSPA networks in time for India’s Diwali celebrations next Autumn. He admitted that data revenues in India have stagnated at around 10 percent but said that Bharti would “really focus on data when HSPA is ready.”
Kohli also predicted that India was on track to hit 1 billion mobile connections by 2015 (from around 500 million today) with at least 30 percent of these connections being used to access the mobile Internet. Over the same period, he said that the Indian mobile industry’s contribution to GDP was expected to grow from around 2.3 percent currently to around 3 to 4 percent.
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