India: 34% of DTH subs are “inactive”

India has a claimed DTH universe of some 91.5 million TV subscribing homes. The problem is that more than a third of these ‘subscribers’ are inactive according to the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI).

TRAI looks on the bright side and says that ‘active’ subscribers grew 3.36 per cent in the quarter-year to March 31st (to a total of 60.5 million). However, ‘inactive’ subs grew almost as fast, at 3.05 per cent to 30.1 million. This means that the growth -0 in ‘active’ and ‘inactive’ subs has stayed much the same over the past 3 quarter-year periods.

TRAI has modified how it calculates these inactive subscribers, and now calculates its data on the number of “temporary suspended” homes as being inactive for not more than 120 days.