Everything you wanted to know about Operator Billing in India.

 It was the end of 2014 when we reported that Idea Cellular subscribers in India can now buy app and games from the Windows Phone Store via operator billing (or carrier billing). Idea Cellular is India's 3rd largest mobile operator, with over 150 million subscribers.

 Microsoft and Idea Cellular introduced operator billing on the Windows Store for Idea subscribers. This partnership enables Idea users on all Microsoft Lumia devices as well as all Windows-based smartphones across brands to access their favorite premium apps and games from the Windows Store and pay for them through integrated operator billing.

 Unlike other parts of the world, credit card penetration in India is tiny and this in turn impedes the consumer purchase experience and limits app monetization. There are only 19 million credit cards in India, which is less than 2% of the total population of the country. Even adding debit cards to the mix pushes the number to only 350 million.

 Globally, the Windows Store offers 81 mobile operator billing connections in 46 market. 80% of people across the world prefer operator billing versus credit card when available. Microsoft claims that the average paid downloads per user increases by 268% when operator billing is available. Operator billing also helps developers increase revenues, and there's an increase of 8x per month for total paid transactions in emerging markets and 3x in developed markets.

 Source: WindowsCentral