Did you just get a 'missed call'?

New Delhi: French turn off their mobiles during meals, Chinese call and hang up after few seconds while Spanish are reluctant to use voicemail.

But when it comes to Indians, it is the missed call they are most (in)famous for.

Who needs etiquette when it costs you money! This is what seems to be the Indian way with mobile phones. The Indian mobile user seems to have mastered the art of 'missed calls' - and actually to communicate without answering the calls!

While cellphone operators are reluctant to give the exact share of missed calls, according to industry estimates, it is somewhere around 20-25 per cent.

"Even though cellular tariffs are pretty low, people were ingeneously using 'Missed calls' for signalling and saving money. The call rates are already low but most users want to make it lower by resorting to missed calls," says V Kumar, a cellphone user, who on an average gets around 10-15 missed calls every day.

"It's very irksome to call back someone every half an hour for no work of yours," says Kumar, noting the problem is more in case of office goers as callers think the office is going to pay for call back."

"Users tend to resort to giving missed calls when the message to be conveyed is just to make an announcement of one's presence or somewhat in those lines," Principal telecom analyst, Gartner, Kobita Desai, says.

"But there is a natural progression towards wanting to communicate more than just merely indicating one's arrival. That is driven by a real need to communicate and getting habituated to using a medium to do so this is not going to be a major issue in future," says Desai.

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"There is also a situation when the other person has to call back. No doubt mobile tariffs are quite low and the price differential with fixed is very narrow. However that is not necessarily the case with prepaid tariffs which is still significantly higher and also the pulse rate is shorter. Mobile calls are billed at 60 secs whereas fxied calls are billed at 180 secs."

But when it comes to 'who loses and who gains on missed calls', Desai says "it would depend on where the call originates from. If more calls originate from the fixed network then the lion's share of the call revenue is retained by fixed network operator. Missed calls have to originate from some network. So there's always percentage given as interconnect/termination to the network on which the calls terminate. However good interconnect rates are dependent on the volume of traffic generated.”

"Further not getting threshold revenue (Cost of servicing + margins) from their home subscribers may affect business sustainability in the mid to long term," notes Desai.

But for the customer, it's all about money in this case!