THE MOST IMPORTANT eventin Indian business in 2011 may have been an outburst on September 6th by SuniL Mittal, the boss of Bharti Airtel, the mobile-phone operator. India's telecoms industry is admired the world over for the innovative way in which it has slashed prices and put phones into the hands of even the very poorest. Today there are some 600m active subscribers in India, many of them in the countryside. But Mr Mittal said the extra cost of servicing rural customers, and their low usage levels, had made things unprofitable. Prices are now expected to go up across the industry, after two decades of decline. India's low-cost telecoms revolution has, it seems, reached its limit.
展开▼
