• ARPU will grow from $18.34 this year to $21.42 by 2025.
• Fixed communication services market revenues to grow at an annual rate of 4.6% from $6.1b in 2020 to $7.7b in 2025.
• Voice ARPU will fall from $5.38 this year to $4.62 in 2025.

Bengaluru: Average revenue per user (ARPU) from India’s fixed broadband will grow more than six per cent to $19.47 next year compared to $18.34 this year, fuelled by the expansion of fibre to the home (FTTH) network infrastructure.

The ARPU will grow to reach $21.42 by 2025 and fixed broadband revenues will increase at an annual growth rate of 6.9 per cent over 2020-2025.

India is planning to connect six lakh villages with optical fibre in the next 1,000 days as part of the national broadband mission.

Sanjay Dhotre, Minister of State for Communications, said at a recent webinar that the national broadband mission of 2019 is to ensure broadband connectivity to all villages by 2022 with an investment of Rs7 lakh crore from stakeholders.

As of September this year, about 23,133 Gram Panchayats have been made service ready and 1.47 lakh kilometres of optical fibre cable has been laid under the second phase.

The national mission aims to accelerate the growth of digital infrastructure, bridge the digital divide and provide affordable and universal access of broadband to 1.3 billion Indians.

Though DSL is the primary technology to deliver fixed broadband services in 2020 in India, Deepa Dhingra, Telecom Analyst at GlobalData, said that fibre broadband lines will expand at the fastest growth rate of 15.3 per cent over the forecast period.

“Growth in fibre broadband lines will be driven by the focus on the expansion of fibre-network infrastructure by the government and operators like Reliance Jio,” she said.

BSNL to be the leader

However, she said that BSNL will lead the fixed voice and broadband segments this year, essentially due to its strong foothold in circuit-switched and VoIP services segments as well as in DSL broadband services segment.

“BSNL has been promoting monthly DSL broadband packages with unlimited voice minutes to drive its subscription share in the fixed broadband market,” she said.

According to research firm GlobalData, total fixed communication services market in India will remain fairly resilient during the Covid-19 crisis in 2020 and the segment’s revenues are poised to grow at a compounded annual growth rate of 4.6 per cent from $6.1 billion in 2020 to $7.7 billion in 2025, driven by growth in fixed broadband services segment,

On the other hand, she said that fixed voice revenue in India will drop at an annual growth rate of 1.9 per cent during 2020-2025, due to drop in circuit-switched subscriptions and decline in voice ARPU levels over the forecast period.

Voice ARPU will fall five per cent to $5.11 next year compared to $5.38 this year, reaching $4.62 in 2025.

However, India’s telecom service revenue growth over 2020-2025 will be supported by mobile voice, mobile data, fixed brodaband and pay-TV segments.

Mobile voice to be largest contributor

Mobile voice will remain the largest revenue contributor during the forecast period while mobile data will grow at an annual growth rate of 18.3 per cent, driven by rising mobile data usage over smartphones and growing adoption of high-speed 4G services.

As per GlobalData stats, the overall telecom and pay-TV services revenue in India will grow at an annual growth rate of 7.8 per cent during 2020-2025.

4G will represent the largest share of the total mobile subscriptions in 2020 at 61.1 per cent and will remain the leading technology with its subscription share reaching 83.3 per cent by 2025, supported by the ongoing investment by operators such as Vodafone Idea and Airtel in the expansion of their LTE networks.