In an article for Business Standard, Unitech Wireless's Chairman Sanjay Chandra says that despite the profitability issues in the short-term, the industry's size will double in five years. ARPU numbers as reported by players currently are understated. The historical subscriber-linked spectrum allocation methodology used by the regulator in India incentivises operators to take advantage of flexibility in reporting churn and hence overstate the number of subscribers. The real subscriber number in India is estimated to be 20-30 per cent lower than that reported. This implies that the real ARPU is 25-35 per cent higher than that reported. At a 25 per cent higher ARPU, the per subscriber and per tower economics suddenly seem much more viable. Two, the total size of industry in terms of revenue is expected to more than double from the current $22-25 billion to over $50 billion in five years. In addition, the cost of new operations is much lower now than that of existing operations b...