India is one of the most fascinating wireless markets and not only because of its size and enthusiastic uptake of wireless connectivity to run most daily activities. India defies most of our deepest ingrained assumptions about how wireless technology should be deployed and marketed, and how to profit from it.

It turns out that despite extremely low ARPUs, initially fueled by aggressive competition, users in India have among the highest data consumption, and operators are profitable. Not only that, ARPUs are rising. Maybe there are lessons to be learned.

We should abandon our preconception of India as a low-revenue, slow-to-innovate, and somewhat boring market. Necessity to adapt to a tough environmental and economic environment has spurred a highly innovative approach to wireless services, that does not require advanced 5G services, VIP access, network slicing—all things for which we now know subscribers have little appetite for even in richer countries.

Our guide to the mesmerizing Indian wireless market is no other than Shiv Putcha, Director, Research and Consulting at GSMA Intelligence, who is based in India, but has spent a long time in the US (I know him since his days at Qualcomm in San Diego), so he has a broad perspective on the local market. We spent little time with the basic metrics of the Indian market and headed for the less advertised features that make India unique and an innovative model that can make us think differently about monetization.

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