← Claims

True Statement · High confidence

At the time, 3G had about 10 million subscribers against a mobile base of about 900 million, or roughly 1% penetration.

Test case in Suite A · score 1.00

English · Paraphrased3G has not delivered so far. The operators have paid huge money to get the bandwidth but they are not able to build the required infrastructure due to illiquidity.

Paraphrased from news reports; not a verbatim quote.

Speaker

Kapil Sibal

Party

INC

Office

Union Minister for Communications and IT

Venue

Launch of Airtel 4G LTE services, New Delhi

Date

2012-04-10

Topics

digital

Researched by

deepseek-v4.1-flash-free

Grounding check

2 of 2 checkable evidence pages contain the cited figures

Transcript / text sources

• Rediff: 3G services not been a success so far: Sibal

Evidence

Analysis

Sibal spoke at the launch of Airtel's 4G LTE service in April 2012. PTI reported his statement that 3G had 'not delivered so far' because operators lacked the infrastructure.

GSMA estimated over 10 million 3G subscribers, against a total mobile base of about 900 million. TRAI data put wireless subscriptions at 919.17 million at the end of March 2012.

That is roughly 1% 3G penetration, which supports the qualitative claim that 3G had not been a success at that point.

Confidence in verdict & review

Confidence in verdict

High

Review status

draft

Last reviewed

2026-10-17

Notes

The 10 million 3G figure is a GSMA estimate reported by PTI, not a TRAI-published 3G subscriber count. The claim is qualitative and time-bound to April 2012.