Harish Palaniappan's

Verizon, vodafone and many other US or UK based communications/internet service providers could have a bright business future if they came to sell their services in India.

Why?
India is fast consuming huge bandwidth for internet services, and telephone /mobile services. With small enterprises coming up in clusters, and every household considering computers and broadband as necessary as a Refrigerator, the Indian market is whopping big to miss for big multinational service providers.

Ask about the strength of the "Indian market" from Coca-cola and Pepsi, and they will tell you how much they sold and made since the 1990's.. (Only in the last couple of years do the cola companies have few hiccups, due to increased acceptance of the health concerns of drinking cola with its effervescence ingredients). Once you understand the deal Indians want, and you get acceptance, multinationals won't have time to look back.

Citibank had a dream run until other local Indian banks learned from its marketing...
Honda, Suzuki all have, and are still having India on their earnings charts in the top order.

For the question "why?", these are the core answers:

1. Currently not one multinational is servicing the communications market, be it the internet or the mobile phones.

2. Because the Indian companies providing these services have come to see no international competition, they make good money.

3. Rather than competing with each other, the Indian companies all go hand-in-hand in making money and just reword their deals and offers keeping their base cost almost or just the same.

4. For the cost of what verizon sells as 768kbps DSL in the United states, Indian companies are making the same money by providing around 64kbps technically, and marketing the package as 128 / 256 / 512 kbps. Yes, be it 128 / 256 / 512, its all the same speed in India, and the communications ministry in India, the regulatory authority all approve of this practice.

5. For the cost of what vodafone sells in UK or Ireland as a 'social connection' prepaid package, Indian companies are selling similar plans with approx. 40% hidden costs, raising this 40% extra cost without even informing the customer first hand through an advertisement or package brochure.

For all the above reasons, companies like verizon or vodafone, would be able to easily create the infrastructure and bandwidth for selling these services for very competitive prices, and still having very good profit margins on each unit of the services or products.

Good deals have good acceptance in india...even at a higher price.

A look at how the vehicle Honda Activa has struck gold in the market will provide the needed proof. Scooters seem to always have a good market in india.. especially the ungeared vehicles for men. Compared to other scooters available, their mileage, and related parameters, Honda Activa had a mileage comparable to that of a 4-stroke bike for indian roads, and was marketed as a friendly fresh new scooter (the last time there was a new scooter designed for men and attracting the family audience was a Bajaj scooter from the 1980's).

For all these reasons the Honda Activa is making brisk business, and is priced only a few bucks less than a 4-stroke bike for the same audience. Un-tethered by the pricing, there are still more takers for the Honda Activa since its considered equivalent to buying a 4-stroke bike without gears.

The local mobile phone service providers do attractive deals like lifetime prepaid cards. The hidden costs in the deal go like this. If you had 50Rupees worth of talktime on your phone, every outgoing call costs 4.99rupees per 60 sec pulse, if you had 400 rupees worth of talktime, each outgoing call costs 2.99 rupees per pulse. The intention is to make the user keep buy talkvalue in replacement for the lifetime free prepaid offer.

BSNL a communications company started All-India one-rupee per phone call concept and made huge promotion campaigns. What was hidden from the customer though was, the one rupee per call was actually one rupee per pulse, and this pulse was much lesser than the earlier pulse secs that were in use. Today even a local call through BSNL phones is actually costing the user higher than what he used to pay. Earlier it was 1 rupee per call for a 3 minute subsidized pulse. Now its a 60 sec pulse that costs 1 rupee per call.

All internet and mobile phone service costs from Indian companies have disguises and hidden costs. You cannot find even one Ad campaign without the wording "* conditions apply". Stands applied lots of conditions and rules which obviously have to be broken by users to use the services and the companies happily charge higher than advertised charges.

End Note:
Verizon and vodafone like companies, would enjoy competing in such market conditions where deals and offers are more important than quality of services. Because being multinational competitors, they would be easily selling a reliable, quality service among local competition.

But may be verizon and vodafone can't enter the Indian market at this time, since I believe, if i am right, the ministry of communications have an understanding with Indian communications service companies, to block multinational competition until more years to come. Though this entry point can be eased or broken if big organizations can woo politicians in the ministry.

For the market base and the increasing demand, multinationals would be missing a huge opportunity if they ignored or shy'ed away from tapping the Indian market. This is a market where a barber, grocery store keeper, rickshaw puller have prepaid mobile connections. And this is a market where students of all age groups are using the internet, online gaming is reached notably popular levels (secondLife gamers aren't far away from becoming), and importantly every software company does most of their development, testing / support for outsourced projects through secure internet connections 24/7 a week.