TRAI Data Reveals that Post-Paid Mobile Subscribers are switching Platforms from CDMA to GSM. Post-paid subscribers are of relatively high quality and essentially are subscribers that were the early adopters of wireless telephony. The GSM incumbents, as a result, have managed to garner the majority share of these subscribers.
Over-time, pre-paid became the default choice for subscribers lower down the quality and this led to post-paid % (of overall subscribers) witnessing a declining trend. The trend accelerated with the GSM launch by dual technology operators – Tata DoCoMo and RCom. Some new entrants, like Uninor, didn’t even offer post-paid connection and encouraged churn.
The growth rate of post-paid subscriber additions has infact doubled in the last 5 quarters v/s the previous 4 quarter period (see chart below). Interestingly, the proportion of post-paid subscribers actually rose albeit marginally in the Mar-12 quarter.The catalyst for this reversal in trend looks to be mobile number portability with CDMA post-paid subscribers shifting to GSM competitors. Adding to the advantage of GSM operator is the wider choice of new SmartPhones which are the sought after gadgets of Post-Paid subscribers who also have high ARPU.
