According to the Analysys Mason, Mobile data consumers in India will be paying not more than ₹50 per GB by 2020 against ₹228 which they paid for a GB in 2016. If data plan declines to ₹50 per GB, the 4G LTE data usage would go up to 6-7 GB per month with an assumption of 17% Wi-Fi offload as per current trends. While the 3G data usage is expected to reach 1.5-2 GB per day by 2020 because 3G tariffs are expected to drop in line with 4G tariffs.
Jio should be given the appreciation for bringing such change. With Jio’s low-cost plans, people are able to use 4G data on their phones and other telecom companies have also reduced their prices in order to compete with the newcomer. Now it is expected that Jio is soon going to launch affordable 4G phones which will also contribute to increasing 4G traffic.
Siddharth Thakkar, a consultant at Analysys Mason said, “In India, the contribution of voice is still higher at 60-70% but we expect India to move in a direction where voice contributes only 30-40%, as per the international benchmarks. But to sustain a viable business case in future where high data consumption can be catered to, Indian MNOs will be required to have more than 17-18% market share and will have to bring down the cost per GB for the end user to ₹30-40″.
Besides this, the telecom operators will also need a large amount of spectrum, including sub-GHz spectrum, in order to provide extensive coverage as well as to support the traffic at a great scale, the research firm said. Also, to support the tariff reduction to ₹50/GB, telecom companies will need to target 5GB/month data usage per subscriber.