How much do Indians speak on the phone?

• The number of minutes every subscriber spends on voice calls on the phone has only increased.
  
• While data is indeed very cheap in India, the users have been left wanting a better quality of service.
  
• Average data consumed increased 44% in the one year ending September 20.

Well, a lot.

The cost of using data services has slid sharply in the last couple of years, thanks to the entry of Reliance Jio with deep pockets and aggressive tariff plans.

At about ₹11 per gigabyte (GB) of data, the cost of voice calls via the Internet is probably the cheapest in the world. It would be fair to assume that people use services like WhatsApp to make calls instead of the traditional mode.

But that’s not true.

The number of minutes every subscriber spends on voice calls on the phone has only increased even as the cost of data services crashed.


“People are used to the convenience of dialling a call, and a growing number of users are getting into the voice mode with the hindrance of cost also going away,” Faisal Kawoosa, founder of tech and telecom consulting firm techARC, told the Times of India.

While data is indeed very cheap in India, the users have been left wanting a better quality of service.

So, while the average data consumed has increased 44% in the one year ending September 2018, voice calls via data has only been a small part of it.