We have seen mobile data explosion in past year: Himanshu Kapania, Idea Cellular

Idea Cellular’s managing director Himanshu Kapania shared his industry outlook with Rhik Kundu after announcing the company’s second quarter earnings. Excerpts

What are your views on the recent Trai recommendations on spectrum auctions?
The supply of spectrum that will be available for the upcoming auctions will be a constraint and Trai has correctly identified the problem. It is now up to the department of telecommunications to find a solution. DoT can either agree to the recommendations or send them back to Trai for reconsideration. If the DoT were to accept the recommendations, the current auctions are likely to be deferred.

What’s your outlook on the data segment, which is witnessing huge growth?
We have had a mobile data explosion in the last 12 months, registering over 126% growth y-o-y. Overall mobile data consumption on our network has touched the 39.4-billion-MB mark as of the latest quarter. But, currently, only 21% of Idea users access internet from their mobile.

At present, only 9% of our user base is on 3G, so we are hopeful and eyeing opportunities for growth, especially in terms of customers accessing the internet. At present, about 30.9 million Idea customers access internet on their phones. Of that, 10.8 million were 3G users in the last quarter.

Airtel recently came out with an operator-agnostic application, Wynk. Can we expect Idea Cellular to follow suit?
As far as internet access applications are concerned, they are growing in leaps and bounds. And most of the work is happening in the external world, with large IT companies as well as small specialised companies creating applications on both generic and specialized basis.

We believe the ecosystem to provide specialised applications is sufficiently large and the participation of individual mobile companies, which are primarily in the infrastructure space and providing connectivity to internet, is not going to make a big difference in growth of application and content.

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