India will adopt 3G faster than Europe, Hong Kong or Australia, but be prepared to shell out more for the triple-play services.

A Yankee Group study on broadband and 3G in India says that at least 200,000 people will be 3G subscribers by the end of 2006 itself and 21.3 million will use 3G by 2010.

These 21 million users in 2010 will make up 23 per cent of the telecom sector’s revenues by then and will be a sizeable 11 per cent of their subscriber base.

If both CDMA and GSM operators launch 3G this year, 0.2 per cent of total mobile users or 0.3 per cent of the total urban mobile users will have 3G phones within six months, finds the study.

The survey on Enabling India’s Broadband Economy: The 3G Way was conducted by the Yankee Group for CII, over the last two quarters of 2005.

Yankee Group Senior Analyst for Wireless / Mobile in Asia-Pacific, Farid Yunus, said today that the stumbling block for 3G in India is not the handset prices, but regulatory ambiguity on spectrum.

‘‘We do not favour India adopting a separate spectrum band for 3G, or making subscriber-based spectrum allocations,’’ he said.

Yunus pointed out 3G has not taken off in China because their spectrum allocation did not match the globally adopted 3G frequency. A subscriber-based allocation criteria would in turn be unique to India.

Operators, however, will make a killing from 3G revenues and after 2006, no operator with 3G services will have to look back. The revenues are expected to skyrocket from negligible until early 2007 to 23 per cent of overall revenues by 2010.

By that time, the average cost of 3G infrastucture will also be comparable with the cost of installing base stations for today’s 2.5G and 2G technologies. This, too, will be welcome for operators, whose average per-user revenues are skidding from $9.50 per month in 2004, to below $5 by 2008.

(www.indianexpress.com)