Daily Archives: 15th Jan 2006

Another blog

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I have added another blog; this time on Word Press.

As I mention in the First post, there were a couple of ideas that got thrown up while discussion here. I felt constrained to carry this out on this channel. Hence, I chose to host on Word Press.

Of course, this would be an occasional blog. The idea behind this to have a natural evolution of ideas which holds relevance for me and perhaps you. Most of the regulars here have given me totally new perspective to issues which I never knew were possible. A BIG thanks for that.

I wouldn’t stop posting here; some of the posts would be cross posted there too.

Howsoever I wish to be regular, frankly, there is nothing of much consequence happening on the Indian Telecom scene.There are the same villians, BSNL, MTNL or perhaps your “operator” you love to hate.

Fact is that it’s been a roller coaster ride to track the developments on the telecom scene.

Before I end, I looked up the Indian Blogosphere. There were a few honourable mentions indeed; at a later date. I was indeed fortuitous enough to come across them. Most of the others were sheer wastage of time and bandwidth.

I didn’t realise, however, that this blog is the only one which is ranting about the Indian Telecom as a whole. Which makes me kind of unique. I wasn’t even considered for Indian Bloggies Award nomination for writing on a thankless issue. Which is perhaps as unglamourous as it gets. This means that I am in competiton with myself only!

Which further means I award myself some fancy category- let’s say for award for the most assinine category ever!

Jokes apart, a BIG thanks to the regular readers here.

Get the RSS feeds

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I have been facing immense pressure on my schedule. Since I wouldn’t be able to update this as frequently as I would like this to be, I strongly advise you to get the RSS Feed Of course, in case you wish to.

Opera has inbuilt RSS reader;any website which has RSS enabled would show up a blue button on the top right hand corner in the address bar. In Linux, you can use Akregator (part of KDE desktop).

A link to various RSS readers on Rediff.

Wikipedia has more information. For more on syndicated web content click here.

BSNL, MTNL in the dock.

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Hindu reports:

It could be termed a problem of plenty for the fast growing IT industry here as the high-tech sector is facing the latest roadblock in poor broadband connectivity and allegedly lacklustre response from service providers in trouble-shooting. (This report is from Calcutta).

While a number of the 235 IT and ITES companies were stuck with the broadband problem, the worst affected was the packaged software maker Vedika Software, which was having a tough time in servicing clients abroad.

“We are facing serious trouble in providing online technical support to our customers in markets like Singapore, Malaysia and Philippines. The slow and pathetic performance of broadband connections led to severe problem in uploading, downloading files and resulted in significant revenue losses for the company,” Vedika CEO Arvind Agarwal said.

Moreover, the lack of response from the service providers, particularly BSNL, had a lot to be desired.

In another incident, MTNL is in dock:

Shocked at the highly inflated telephone bills and adoption of illegal means to recover them by telecom major MTNL, a city consumer court has asked it to issue fresh bill, reconnect the phone and pay Rs 5,000 as compensation to a consumer.

The consumer forum rightly notes:

wherever there is huge difference in the bill for a particular cycle and the past bills, it is the duty of the authorities to make an indepth enquiry to find out whether the subscriber had ever made calls at phone numbers which were responsible for inflated bills

Shocking news because the inflated bill had been quashed earlier at the district level court. The Consumer forum expressed it’s anguish as:

It is shocking….served with a notice by an advocate of MTNL threatening to file criminal as well as civil suit against him and use of illegal means to recover the arrears of bills. Further it said,”this is intolerable…, recovery, if any, can be made only by way of legal process and not through such type of medieval ways particularly when the bill in question has already been quashed by the District Forum.”

The point here is the a software company from Calcutta can get to highlight it’s “anguish” at non complaince of BSNL; I have been writing emails to the heads for the past 6 months without getting even an acknowledgement.

I chose to highlight these press reports- because they are assinine to the extreme; they serve no purpose whatsoever in public interest. Yet, it does reflect the way these PSU’s work and function in a highly autocratic manner.

The private players are no saints either; still there is some degree of accountability. The experience may vary though. One thing that the private players are terribly afraid of is the media. Obviously, they wouldn’t want any bad press for themselves. Hence, part of the reason for their huge ad spends.

BSNL and MTNL are immune to all this-because most of the consumers like me have no REAL choice.