Oct. 13 – India has outpaced China as the world’s fastest growing telecommunications market due to its effective network sharing strategy that has made it possible for telecommunications providers to offer competitively low prices to rural areas.

Global rating agency, Moody’s, said that in the past 18 months,”India’s net additions of 10 million (subscribers) per month have significantly outpaced China’s monthly rate of increase, which is now below eight million a month.”

In the past, it was China that was posting the highest increases in new subscribers monthly. Moody’s said that: “Although emerging markets with relatively low penetration continue to have above-average rates of increase in new subscribers, those numbers tend to be slowing, except in India.”

Moody’s attributes India’s booming telecoms market to its, “innovative means such as outsourcing network management and sharing mobile infrastructure to keep costs low in extending services to under-served rural areas.”

The differences between China and India, Moody’s said, was that mobile operators in India shared base stations and partnered with other firms or independent cell-tower firms in expanding coverage to under-served  rural areas.

The agency said that this strategy to divest non-core assets by selling or sharing cell phone towers was a way to cap costs and maximize capital expenditure when expanding coverage.