VAS, Set to Become Mainstream for Operators

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Value added services are likely to become mainstream for operators and help them increase their ARPU .With over 851 million mobile subscribers in India, operators are putting significant focus on mobile applications and eventually value-added services, including mobile downloads, usage of Internet on mobiles, to sustain loyalty, reduce churn, and increase profit margins for their overall operations.

APRG forecasts that revenue for mobile VAS (value added services) and applications is likely to exceed of US $4 billion by 2015. And across India, consumers have responded with increased adoption of mobile content services and applications, and the eventual uptake of mobile based content for applications like Facebook was especially explosive in 2010.

Mobile Service Providers Airtel, Reliance, and Vodafone all have already launched app stores in 2010 with thousands of titles. The industry is already seeing an earnest shift in the handset market to smartphones, and with the deployment of 3G networks in 2011, combined with Indian consumers appetite for faster bandwidth, the next five years will provide technology vendors ample opportunity to participate in transformation of India to a data centric mobile ecosystem that will make sure that VAS related activities will become mainstream and operators gain more from their set of customers.
 
Experts believe that this trend will develop further with several India telecommunications service providers in 2011 is an investment in a technology infrastructure to offer cloud-based services to enterprise and SMB customers.

VAS will also play a major role in terms of helping the enterprise users gain more from the data era thrown open by the advent of 3G services in India. In such a scenario, it becomes more important for the operator community to keep on innovating on the VAS front.