The year 1998-99 was nothing great for telecom services—be it paging and cellular. However, services like PMRTS (Public Mobile Radio Trunk Service) started gaining acceptability among the corporates and entrepreneurs as they already had a taste of gadgets like cellular, pager, and radio trunking. They finally chose to stick to one of them or a combination of them keeping specific business objectives that these gadgets help in achieving. From a mere 4,000 subscribers in 1997-98, the country now has a radio trunking handset base of 12,000 in 25 cities where PMRTS services are operational, i.e. an increase of 8,000 handsets. The radio trunking services registered an excellent growth of 200 percent. It appears this industry will have a similar growth, as there are a lot of large tenders, which would be finalized in 1999-2000.

The radio trunking market in last fiscal was estimated at Rs 22.4 crore, an increase 113.33 percent. Handsets accounted for Rs 12.8 crore and services accounted for Rs 9.6 crore. In 1997-98, handsets accounted for Rs 6.5 crore and services accounted for Rs 4.0 crore. To start services in other cities, the service providers incurred an investment of Rs 62.5 crore in 1998-99, an increase of 66.66 percent. In years to come, the investment in infrastructure will come down. It will again increase once the number of subscribers increases and it becomes feasible to go for digital technologies like TETRA, iDEN, and APCO 25. If the DoT comes up with a tender for start-up of PMRTS services in other cities in 1999-2000, the infrastructure investment will further shoot up.

In PMRTS services there are regional leaders. Motorola JV—Groupcom and Procall are leaders in southern and northern region, Syntel Telecom in the western region, and Mobilkom in the eastern region. Regarding radio trunking handset, Motorola was the number one vendor with a marketshare of 50 percent. EF Johnson had 30 percent and Kenwood had 20 percent, respectively.

By March 1998, the DoT had on records 27 companies holding 157 licences for providing radio trunking services in more than 30 cities across India. As of date, 88 licences have been rolled out. In the coming fiscal, it appears around 25-30 licences would be rolled out. The remaining companies would start the service depending upon the announcement of future concessions by the government or will freeze the project before the actual start up of service.