I'm kinda surprised when these facts show up in a TIL.
Background info: telecom stats are easily available, and well studied.
Many many finance firms track this market because its a key growth industry, stats for developed and developing nations are available, and India is a massive market.
Few other neat stats - India invented the 0 cost phone call (you give a missed call to a number you hear on the radio and people call you back).
India is a spectacularly cost concious market, so telecom firms have to be clever in extracting money at scale. (1) - will revisit this point at the end.
India is a a mobile first market - as opposed to first world nations which had land lines all over the place before mobile phones were invented.
The mobile network is one of the most championed causes of the Indian govt for a long time, I think at least 4 govts or more.
the GoI recognize the multiplier nature of telecom, and in particular mobile networks.
Theres a small industry of use solar phone chargers to charge phones in villages. You can find solar chargers like this online.
I personally believe that the SC verdict which overturned the auctions did more massive harm to competition in this industry than good. It killed competition.
(1) The Story of VAS: The single metric that is worshipped in the telecom industry is ARPU - Average revenue per User. Basically tells people if you have a million users, how much money will you make.
When things were simple, money was made off of phone charges, and sms charges. India being India, people don't, didn't, can't and couldn't afford to pay for that. Thats why you have/had so many plans which focused on cheap talk time or family groups etc.
But people figured out one silver lining, one place where telecom firms could make money. VAS - Value added services. Amazingly, people would pay money for VAS.
Here, look at the last section of this report
https://www.iamai.in/sites/default/files/position_papers/Indicus-Mobile-VAS-paper-v7.pdf
It has a line that goes
" However, it is not that MSPs are inherently villainous entities. They are responding to market conditions that favour such shortsighted action on their part. "
But the Telcos were essentially the worst kind of villanous entities. The mobile VAS space has 2 parts - the telecom firms acting as gatekeepers, and the Value added firms as the content providers.
The content providers have all the product and creativity, but they need the Telcos to give them rates and access to their network. The telecoms abused this power, you couldn't get a seat on the table unless you went to firms they favored. They were opaque about rates, so you couldn't know what a good price was, but they spoke to each other and knew your margins. As a result you would get squeezed.
These are all horrible things from a market perspective, but we describe it as a market failure, and poor incentives.
And thats one of the core reasons to fight for Net Neutrality in India. Live examples of how telecom firms have already harmed a market and will not act in the customers best interest.