A few months ago, I had visited India, and posted about the hyper-growth in the mobile subscriber base in that country. The Feature today points to a news report that quotes senior government officials as saying that there will be more mobile users in India than wired phone users by end of 2004. Mobile phones currently make up 45 percent of all Indian telephones, though 70 percent of new phones added there in April and May were mobile, The Feature adds. At the end of May, India was estimated to have 79.4 million telephones – 36.3 million of them cellular, according to Government of India figures.

But don’t let the numbers fool you – overall telephone penetration was only 7.29 percent at the end of May, up from 5.35 percent a year ago – that’s two percent penetration increase for a nation of 1.03 billion people, which makes it a meaningful penetration rate. Think about it – a decade ago, the total phone penetration was a mere one percent. It is expected that there will be 100 million phone connections in India by end of this year, bringing total penetration to about 10%.

(Phone Icon courtesy Thomas Schougaard)