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The subscriber base for radio trunking market was close to 30,000 as on March 2004 with a total market size of Rs 54.5 crore.

There is another side to these figures. Due to the cut-throat competition, and the high spectrum royalty and license fees required to be paid per unit as the Wireless Planning and Coordination (WPC) charges, the number of units in use goes highly under reported. Also, the captive users like the hospitals and other government agencies do not disclose their usage figures, hence the correct figures do not appear. The actual number of subscribers is well above the 45,000–50,000 mark.

With mobile operators rolling out services like push-to-talk at effective prices and constantly adding subscribers, the market for PMRTS is shrinking. Not that PMRTS will be replaced by such services, but if PMRTS does not offer value-added services, like data, it could go the radio paging services´ way.

At a churn rate of almost four percent per month or 50 percent annually, PMRTS has only 0.1 percent of the total wireless subscribers, compared to five percent internationally. Though TRAI and DoT have been making policies for it, these have been wanting. Of the total subscriber base Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, and Chennai together account for 70 percent of the market share. Delhi leads with 8,684 subscribers, with Mumbai and Bangalore taking 3,139 and 3,240 respectively.

Procall, which comes under the Agrani Group, leads the market with 7,361 subscribers, followed by Arvind Mills and QuickCalls with 6,181 and 3,590 respectively.

Out of the 19 service areas, the subscriber base of 14 has increased in the last quarter. These areas are Mumbai, Bangalore, Chennai, Kolkata, Vishakapatnam, Surat, Vadodra, Gurgaon, Navi Mumbai Belapur, Indore, Pune, Ahmedabad, Faridabad, and Jaipur. Bangalore added the maximum number of subscribers (496), followed by Chennai (139) and Pune (100). The market witnessed a negative growth till the quarter that ended in September 2003. In the quarter ended in December 2003, the market finally took a turn and headed for positive growth.

There have been a few incentives for the market, like increasing the circle area and reducing the bank guarantee from Rs 5 lakh to Rs 1 lakh under the ULR. However, operators have more demands like reducing the revenue sharing to under five percent; and if some of their demands are not resolved then it could threaten the industry´s survival.

Regulators Take Notice
On the regulatory front, MTROA has been demanding two-way PSTN connectivity and a separate numbering system for ensuring single instrument usage by subscribers. In many countries, two-way PSTN is allowed over PMRTS, without affecting other wireless services. But TRAI has not been in favor, saying that it will be against the CUG nature of PMRTS. However, one-way PSTN connectivity has been allowed. Fulfilling these demands is unlikely to harm other wireless services as PMRTS caters to small groups only.

In countries, where the service is offered alongside cellular services, PMRTS does not eat into the cellular operators´ revenues and has not exceeded a subscriber base of more than five percent of the total market. The potential of the PMRTS will not be fully met till regulators give the required clearances and pay heed to the regulatory needs of the market. Recommendations made in January 2003 have still not been addressed by the policy makers. Enterprises can opt for captive services or outsource them under PMRT services.

When services were first started, operators paid a license fee. But later, the frequencies were allotted to captive users almost free. Thus, radio operators not only lost potential customers, but also paid for something that became free later. To bring some consistency, it has been recommended that captive users also pay a license fee similar to that paid by operators. Also, while the market anticipates an increase in the wireless space under the ULR, it fears that some people might hold frequencies and sell them for a premium later.

In spite of TRAI´s recommendation that the total license fee and spectrum royalty should not exceed five percent of the total revenues (AGR), the amount is almost nine percent of the revenue (Rs 300 per subscriber). To facilitate growth, MTROA has been demanding: a revenue-sharing plan, license fee removal, and fixing Rs 100 as the royalty to be paid to the WPC.

Market Players
The PMRTS market has not been able to experience even anywhere close to its growth curve of FY 2002–03, for over a year now. Though radio trunking offers unlimited calls for a fixed sum and offers group calls, which is not possible in mobile telephony, the market is not in favor of the service due to the absence of value-added services. Once the desired spectrum is available to operators, the services and the price at which they are offered will have no competition from GSM and CDMA.

Agrani (Zee Group) has been on an acquisition spree. It acquired Quickcalls India, Bhilwara Telenet, SmartTalk, Procall, and Punwire thereby ending with PMRTS licenses for Mumbai, Delhi, Chennai, Kolkata, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Pune, Surat, Baroda, Gurgaon, Faridabad, Jaipur, Chandigarh, Ludhiana, Jalandhar, Lucknow, and Kanpur. In FY 2003–04, it had a market share of close to 51 percent and total revenues crossed Rs 27.6 crore, a five percent growth over the last year´s Rs 26 crore. Procall and QuickCall continue to be the lead revenue earners for the group.

Pune-based AryaOmnitalk, a joint-venture company promoted by the Lalbhai Group and the JM Baxi Group, is active in: Mumbai (Vasai, Thane, Vashi), Delhi (NCR), Chennai, Kolkata, Bangalore, Ahmedabad, Baroda, Surat, Indore, and Vizag. The company saw around nine percent growth in the FY 2003–04 and has a little over 37 percent of the total market share. AryaOmnitalk is a PMRTS provider as well as a data solutions provider and all its solutions work on multiple wireless backbones such as GSM, radio, and Mobitex. These solutions will target taxi fleet management, cash transportation, and large-scale people transportation within and across cities.

Fleet Vigil, AryaOmnitalk´s flagship mobile data application, provides automatic vehicle location solutions for a host of industry verticals. AryaOmnitalk has clients across the industry verticals like call centers, public utilities, construction, taxi fleets, emergency medical services, and cash vans. It has won a deal from ELCOT for a dial 100/103 call center solution integrated with a GPS based automatic vehicle location system (AVLS) for Chennai Police and a fleet management system for Orix Auto and Business Solutions.

United Liner Agencies of India that operates in Delhi and Kolkata has around 7.5 percent of the market share. Mobilkom, which operates in Delhi, plans to provide data services on its networks in a major way. This includes onsite automation for mobile machine control, asset location, and environmental monitoring especially SCADA, besides automatic vehicle location on GSM and CDMA networks. Also, the company is offering LED and LCD displays for information and wireless security alarms. India Satcom is another operator with a presence in Bangalore.

By our Sr Reporter