Indian mobile numbers dont add up
By Asha and DJ

If the Govt of India is to be believed, more than 650 million Indians use mobile phones. And the number is increasing every day. Dual SIM phones have become very popular in India.  Many senior executives have a number of phones.  So, how does one work out the exact number of cell phone users in India rather than the number of phones sold? Many Telecom experts advocate caution.

On Dec 17, 2010, Techgoss had published an article which linked to a mainstream Pakistani news report about how the Pakistan mobile phone numbers may be inflated by as much as 30 percent (Article republished below)

LIRNEasia (lirneasia.net) describes itself as a regional information and communication technology (ICT) policy and regulation capacity-building organization active across the Asia Pacific.  Put simply, it is a think tank and research body which strives to improve the lives of the people in the Asia Pacific. By all accounts, it is doing a sterling job.

The LIRNEasia CEO, Rohan Samarajiva, Ph.D, is on the Board of a number of prestigious organizations.  Sri Lanka based Rohan Samarajiva is also a visiting faculty member at TERI University in New Delhi.  Last year, Rohan was among the 3 finalists for the prestigious Bastiat Prize for Online Journalism.

Techgoss caught up with Rohan who tells us why most mobile phone subscriber numbers may be off the mark

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The only accurate method of measuring the number of SIMs is by conducting demand side surveys.  We do this (new one coming up in 2011) but ours are not nationally representative.  Those are expensive and can only be done by governments, and even they do it once in a few years.

Supply-side numbers are pretty bad.  Pakistan had terrible overcount problems and they have been cleaning it up using a database that allows citizens to check.  They dropped 10 million in one week.

India's numbers were inflated because the govt was giving spectrum on the basis of claimed subscriber numbers.  Bangladesh and LK are also inflated, but no one knows by how much. 

Here is what we said in a paper given at an ITU event recently:

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The entire enterprise of collecting and disseminating ICT indicators is in crisis.  The basic methods of data collection were designed for monopoly provision of a limited set of services by government-owned or regulated entities, known quaintly as “administrations.”  Since the reforms of the past three decades, the markets for ICT services have grown in complexity with multiple suppliers striving to meet consumer needs in workably competitive settings.  New business models have emerged yielding a range of price-quality bundles in a range of services unimaginable in the bad old monopoly days.  In sum, ICT service markets have begin increasingly to resemble fast moving consumer goods (FMCG) markets rather than supplier dominated public-utility markets.  In particular, the Budget Telecom Network Model for mobile voice services, a new business model that first emerged in South Asia and is now rapidly spreading throughout the developing world (Samarajiva, 2009), has made the conventional associations between subscribers and users obsolete.  For example, this model leads to practically giving away SIMs or connections, making untenable the ITU definition of a mobile subscription.  For example 23 percent of owners in Socio-Economic Classifications D and E (the bottom of the pyramid, or BOP) in Pakistan reported in 2008 having more than one active SIM card, with some even reporting having as many as five active SIMs.   In recognition of this, ITU now collects/reports subscriptions, instead of subscribers, as it previously did.

In the FMCG world no one expects soap producers to report how much soap they make to the soap regulatory authority which compiles the reported data once a year and submits a report using standard definitions and formats to the International Soap Union which after a few weeks or months publishes soap indicators for the whole world.  What happens instead is the collection of data on soap on the market and fluctuating market shares at the retail level through the mechanism of retail audits (Treasure, 1953).  This is the end game for ICT services.  We are now in the interregnum.  The old supply-side data dominated indicators simply do not work.  The new retail-audit type data collection mechanisms have yet to emerge.
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(Techgoss had published the following on Dec 17, 2010)

How many cell phones?
By Asha

If the Government of India is to be believed, more than 650 million Indians use mobile phones. And the number is increasing every day.

Dual SIM phones have become very popular in India.  Many senior executives have a number of phones.  So, how does one work out the exact number of cell phone users in India rather than the number of mobile phones sold? Especially, because it in the interest of each Telecom company to give extra numbers to impress the share market.

Dawn is reporting that the Pakistani Government claims that it has 100 Million mobile phone users, but the actual number may be much less

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Owing to multiple-SIM phenomenon, the actual number of mobile phone subscribers in Pakistan is far less than 100.1 million as declared by the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA), Dawn has learnt.

The mobile penetration stands at 60.4 per cent with a growth of 5.1 per cent this year. As the PTA is not maintaining the record of “inactive subscribers”, it is difficult to know the `actual` number of cell-phone users in the country.

“Since a large number of subscribers have more than one SIM, their actual number in Pakistan is not more than 60 to 65 million,” an official of a telecom operator said.

“We cannot have the exact count of mobile phone penetration unless someone — either the PTA or any other authority — starts maintaining the data of those having multiple SIMs,” he said.
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Could this be an issue in India as well?