India's mobile market has been pegged to reach 812 million connections by the end of the year, and 1.36 billion in 2020.
Analysys Mason predicts that 3G and 4G technologies will account for a respective 57.1% and 10.7% of the nation's mobile subscribers by 2020.
But 3G adoption will remained constrained through 2012, due to the high prices of data-only services at present. Adoption will only pick up steam from 2013, when operators are expected to migrate 3G-capable handset users to 3G networks.
Growth in the overall mobile market is also being held back by affordability complaints, with Analysys Mason estimating that unique mobile user penetration is just 34% in 2011, and will be just 54% by 2020.
The growing proliferation of multiple-SIM users is helping to drive the disparity between mobile subscriptions and mobile handset penetration, as are the high number of inactive SIMs - currently an estimated 30%.
Separately, IDC has estimated that the Indian mobile phone market grew 13.8% year-on-year by units shipped in Q3.
Around 47.1 million handsets were shipped during the quarter. Notably, dual-SIM handset shipments grew 25.2% sequentially, more than double the 12% sequential growth for the sector as a whole.