Does this come as a surprise to you? We all might have thought the fastest-growing mobile phone market was China. But that's history. According to the Cellular Operators Association of India, in August India had more new mobile phone subscribers (5.9 vs. 5.2 million) than China. According to an article in The New York Times, India has the lowest-cost phones (Nokia's cheapest model is $43) and also now the lowest cost service contracts (liftetime of incoming call services for $20) in the world. The latter sounds a bit unreal and we will try to verify this.

With the growth comes network congestion, though, and dropped calls or no line available are becoming increasingly a pain with messages going such as: “The network is busy, please try later” or “The mobile you are trying to reach is currently unavailable.”