If one looks at the mobile services market in India today, it can be clearly segmented into three different categories—plain voice services, information services and communication services. The information services include SMS to some extent, and the news and stock market updates. The communication services include SMS (partly) and email, the latter clearly a big application, besides fax and other data services. Besides this, WAP services too have been introduced in an endeavour to bring the Internet to the mobile phones. The significant point here is that the operators have been investing in a chain of new services. "If you look at the mobile services market in India, SMS predominates today—apart from the vanilla voice services. Further, we see applications coming out as not one or two, but more of a suit of applications. This is what we like to call as a hyper market of applications", says Ashwini Bakshi, general manager, Nokia India Limited.

Bakshi points out that apart from these services, there are other categories of services, a la entertainment and productivity services, which are in the evolution stage. "Here you will have services like ringing tone downloads, which are extremely popular in some countries. The other services like picture messaging where one can send icons of flowers, bouquet and also music numbers, would also come under this category", observes Bakshi, defining entertainment on the mobile phones. The productivity services category, which is in the early stages of development, would include things like
calendaring, maintaining schedules over the net, which could be accessed from the mobile phone. If taken further, this can be taken in the realm of mobile commerce as well as in the use of mobile phones to make payments. "These are some of the services, which we feel would pick up", adds Bakshi. This category would also include personal assistant services, wherein a subscriber can dictate a letter to a computer and order the computer to either send it as an email or a fax.

Waiting in the wings, to be introduced, is a service like unified messaging, says 3Com’s Himanshu Goel. This would allow subscribers to retrieve emails and faxes on the same number. Besides this, adds Goel, services like capturing the caller ID in the voice mail for an easy call return, and a notification of the emails on the phone, could become common.

What about Internet on the cell phone? A simple answer would be that it is already a fact of life in India, with many operators introducing WAP services and branding this as a premium service. However, Internet on the phone is not as simple as spelling the word WAP. The Internet is about accessing a Cornucopia of services related to information, communication and entertainment, and it is also about choice. Both, access and choice, are still a problem on the mobile phone as the access isn’t trouble free, with data speeds irritatingly slow and choice too narrow and restrictive.

Where would the mobile phone end up? "The functionality and services will increase, both on the terminal as well as on the network side, in terms of what they will be able to do. In that way, it’s like the PC and Internet discussion. The PC today is called a thick client, as today, millions of the users use PCs to connect to the Internet, which is at the heart of information and entertainment. We believe that the same scenario would prevail in the mobile space as well", says Bakshi.

Ravi Shekhar Pandey