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For India's booming telecom industry, the past 10 years have been an undoubtedly good show. At the start of 2010, as the world is cautiously getting back on its feet, following the mid-2008 global economic meltdown, India's telecom industry is zipping ahead, notching up 15 to 17 million mobile subscribers a month, which makes it the fastest growing market in the world.

Looking back, it is easy to see that it has been the uptake of mobile telephony that has been the key driver of the telecom success story. It has helped in taking the subscriber base from a mere 30 million (mostly fixed line users) and a teledensity of about 2.7 per cent in 1999 to over 562.2 million users as of December 2009 and a teledensity of 47.89 per cent.

Serious competition, affordability and timely policy and regulatory intervention have all contributed to changing the face of telephony in the country and in helping the industry scale new heights. While the New Telecom Policy 1999 (NTP, 1999) allowed operators to move to an easier revenue-sharing regime from the previous fixed licence fee one, the entry of the fourth mobile operator in each circle in 2001 stirred up aggressive competition that led to a fall in tariffs.

In May 2003, the calling-party-pays regime was introduced, which made incoming calls free and gave a big boost to mobile usage. The same year, Reliance Communications (RCOM) (then Reliance Infocomm) joined the race, rolling out mobile services on a CDMA platform. (At the time, Tata Teleservices Limited [TTSL] was the only other CDMA players in the country.) This kicked off a technology war between the CDMA operators and the existing GSM operators (Bharti Airtel, Vodafone Essar [then Hutchison Essar] and Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited [BSNL]), which was eventually resolved with the government agreeing to a unified access service licence, which cleared the way for operators to offer any type of service using any technology, including cellular, fixed line, national and international long distance (NLD and ILD), internet and radio paging.

RCOM's ambitious entry, offering a connection along with a handset for an upfront cost of Rs 500, made history, starting a new trend of handset bundling. Telephony became affordable for low-income users as they signed up in droves, pushing up the teledensity of the country. Other operators quickly followed suit, offering competitive tariffs and innovative value-added services. Handset prices, earlier considered an impediment to growth, came down significantly. In 2005, Motorola introduced its first "made in India" mobile, priced at Rs 1,700.

In 2006, India became the fifth country to join the 100 million mobile subscribers' club and in 2007, it attracted the biggest cross-border interest when Vodafone bought 67 per cent stake in Hutchison Essar for $11.08 billion, valuing the company at $18 billion.

Since then, foreign interest in the Indian telecom market has not waned. The past three years have seen the wireless segment get more crowded with international players like Maxis, NTT DOCOMO, Telenor, Sistema and Etisalat entering the fray. As expected, competition has become even more intense. In some circles, there are as many as 12 operational players jostling for space.

For the user, these developments have meant more choices and lower tariffs. The Pay Per Second billing introduced by TATA DOCOMO (TTSL's GSM brand) has, for instance, brought down the monthly bill of users and got the company more users.

In 2009, India crossed the 500 million mobile user milestone. As is evident, most of the action has been in the mobile segment. The wireline segment has failed to impress. Over the past decade, the number of users has been dwindling steadily. To illustrate, in December 2005, the total number of basic service subscribers stood at 48.93 million, which declined to 37.06 million in December 2009. But steps are being taken to stymie the bleed through measures such as bundling internet, broadband and IPTV services along with a fixed line connection.

In the internet and broadband space, from March 1999 to March 2000, the subscriber base grew more than three times from 250,000 to 850,000 with the entry of private players and lower tariffs. Thereafter, the trend oscillated between growth and decline; it decreased significantly from March 2001 to March 2004, then picked up pace from March 2004 to March 2006. During the period June 2007 to 2009, the subscriber base rose by over 2 million per year and in December 2009, it stood at 7.83 million.

In all, the past decade has been excellent for the telecom industry and there are strong signs that 2010 could be a defining year with lasting changes in the market structure and competitive landscape. In the following pages, tele.net reviews the developments across key segments of the telecom industry over the past 10 years...