Monthly Archive for May, 2006

Corporate Gibberish

Published on 31st May 2006 in General Thoughts. 0 Comments Tags: .

I was aware of this website during my early days of “discovery”. However,after a frustrating Google search (I couldn’t string the keywords in the first go), I was rewarded by this “corporate gibberish generator”

Type in any random string and let’s see the results for Hutch.

At Hutch, we have come to know how to streamline extensibly. The e-business, C2C2C Total Quality Management factor can be summed up in one word: scalable. If you actualize perfectly, you may have to expedite intra-vertically…..Hutch is the industry leader of visionary super-partnerships…Hutch practically invented the term “social networks”. Our feature set is unparalleled, but our intuitive bandwidth and easy use is often considered a remarkable achievement. Your budget for seizing should be at least three times your budget for whiteboarding.

This is just the “tip of the iceberg”. I have a feeling that most of the “business leader types” cross refer such customised generated gibberish, with the sole exception of “misleading”.

Enjoy!

Business World : Rankings and Hutch

Published on 31st May 2006 in Indian Telecom, Mobiles and Telecom News. 1 Comment Tags: , , , , .

Ho hum. Don’t we all know about the truth behind the “famed millions”? Business World carried out a “survey” to identfiy the “leaders” in respective segments. Hutch has come out “on the tops”.

The growth of Hutch from no where to somewhere has been majorly fuelled by opaque cross holdings. Hutch was lucky to be able to buy out BPL mobile, run by Rajiv Chandrashekhar. His claim to fame was the famous spat with his father in law over the spoils of BPL that is trying to resurrect itself and Mumbai license.

Mumbai is the most important market overall. Being the financial hub of India, the spending power and hence the disposable incomes are on the higher side than All India average. Therefore, any company having a presence in the city would surely be able to drive it’s revenues from voice services and add ons.

As for the service part, there is no differential as compared to the other service providers. I have been getting a lot of spam and promotional messages that inundate my inbox; thus forcing me to purge the whole thing once in a while. It is a clear violation of my privacy but then Asim Ghosh, the CEO, doesn’t really think so. He has to drive the revenues, come what may, and pose for preety pictures while spewing out mountains of corporate crap.

Business World is slowly morphing into an advertisement driven magazine. At times, there is an interesting mix of write ups but on a recurring basis, it is disturbing.Frankly, how do these surveys really matter? In the huge technicalities of the “methodology”, the intended purpose is lost. I doubt whether money power plays a part but, by and large, this is all about “perceptions” about a company. The so called “corporate excellence”, even while your peers may hesitate to even piss on you.

The mongrel (or the pug for the “educated”) did some wonders for Hutch. Similarly, in the recent “re branding” exercise, they switched over to dirty pink which is an eye sore in my opinion. How does it improve on their customer orientation? My very first Hutch post paid bill was faulty; any number of emails for the suggestions/complaints went unanswered.

Therefore, Business World has to factor in all these differing variables. There is no independent methodolgy to assess the telecom sector in India; most of the “surveys” are elaborate deceptive exercises funded by the industry itself to keep a buzz about itself. Further, it isn’t about “lifestyle” per se with a smiling moron of a Khan endorsing the product. It’s about utility and word of mouth advertisement about the services that matter the most.

A well thought out strategy and we are left with only “notional competition”. Some day, Business World might as well as bring out another survey that BSNL has topped the rankings because it has introduced live sex chats free of cost. A possibilty. If this sounds absurd, well the present scenario is absurder!

Reservation debate

Published on 31st May 2006 in General Thoughts. 0 Comments Tags: .

Of late, I have been contributing some of my write ups to Desi Critics. A series of posts under the same heading have appeared on these links.

1) The Media And The Reservations Issue.

2)The Reservation Debate: Seeking Inspiration from the “Internationale”

3)The Current Reservation Debate.

4)Reservation Debate and Media’s Response

5)The text of the email published in The Pioneer

6)Text of the email published in The Hindu.

I hope you find them interesting. This is just a small effort to keep the issue alive.

MTNL: Reduction of STD Prices

Published on 25th May 2006 in Indian Telecom and Telecom News. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , .

Long distance call rates between the two metros have been slashed. This was of course, “breaking news”. MTNL has, in effect, made that as local call between the two metros.

There is something that all media houses didn’t report about it.

1)MTNL chooses VSNL as it’s preferred carrier. It bypasses BSNL which was charging it higher rates for carrying MTNL’s calls through it’s networks. BSNL seems to have lost the bids in re negotiations.

2)BSNL has blocked (or threatened to block- I am not sure as yet) free roaming facility for MTNL customers in it’s networks.

3)The reduction of prices is estimated to be 375%.

4)Other operators have been granted National Long Distance calling licences (as reported here) which means that carrier access codes would be introduced shortly. It becomes imperative. If this happens, BSNL’s fortunes would tumble down rapidly.

5)MTNL is a profitable enterpise and the surge in call volumes is expected to be 5 times more than present.

This whole mish mash up means that finally we are having more choice for connecting across geographies. Even though, we are limited to few private players and the Government monopolies.

The only area, in my opinion, where BSNL can scale up is data services since they have a massive lead over others. This again is a far fetched idealised scenario. Expect more fireworks in the voice segment any time now. Reliance and Airtel wouldn’t want to see this oppurtunity slipping by.

Why the F*** Reliance can’t step up it’s fixed line operations soon?

MTNL is in the spotlight at the moment.

Broadband: Next Gen Access

Published on 25th May 2006 in General Thoughts. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

First sample this from Yahoo write up:

To make video transmission and personal interaction so immediate that the remoteness of the participants is erased, you need lots and lots of bandwidth. Bandwidth is the speed at which information — text, pictures, video, and other data — is carried over the Internet. You can visualize the now-vanishing dial-up Internet, with modem speeds of up to 56 Kbps, as a leisurely country lane. Broadband Internet, such as DSL or cable (1 to 5 Mbps), might be a regular street that you travel to get to work.

But the next generation of the Internet, with bandwidth starting between 100 Mbps and 1 Gbps and climbing from there, is a superhighway. (Part of this is already a reality in South Korea/ Japan).

Much of the research is based around Internet2’s high-performance backbone, called Abilene, that currently runs at up to 10 Gbps. But Internet2 is planning to upgrade Abilene to 80 separate channels of 10 Gbps each, using different wavelengths transmitted over fiber-optic cable. These channels could produce a mind-boggling 800 Gbps of bandwidth.

(More on Abiline here)

What could you do with this kind of 800 gbps bandwidth?

You could send high-definition video uncompressed to heighten it to a hyper-realistic level; use multichannel digital sound; display real-time-generated 3D graphics; control remote devices with no latency; or harness separate, powerful computing facilities into one mammoth virtual machine.

(Part of the reason for the development was fuelled by CERN, the world’s largest particle physics labortary. The amout of information it generates is mind boggling. Sharing it over conventional networks is out of question. Hence, the super fast networks hooked on to super computers, working on Linux. What else can power those monsters)?

Further uses of Internet 2 have been described for underwater explorations and telesurgeries; with almost no latency and everything happening in “real time”;we are close to something that was stuff of science fiction couple of years back.

At present, the project is limited to the Universities and is plagued by last mile access hassles for mass scale adoption. This last mile won’t be solved minus heavy investments; something that is not flowing in the sector at the moment.

Hence, it becomes imperative that the Universities/ Research Institutions in India to become early adopters for this kind of technology. The Government could scale up investments for tele conferencing et al.

However, the standards are not yet defined. Plus, it remains an overwhelming American “contribution”. Therefore, they would definitely impose their standards which would be restrictive for use in other countries. The next gen broadband, by whatever means, is plagued by proprietary standards; unless of course, it becomes Open Access/ Open Source. I don’t see this happening as yet.

See the Wikipedia entry.

Internet 2 home page.

Broadband: How much do you really need?

Published on 25th May 2006 in General Thoughts. 1 Comment Tags: , , , , , .

I chanced on CNET write up about the “need for speeds”.

Triple play carrying voice/ data and video is a common place. Yet, an average Joe like us uses Internet for checking email/ casual surfing. How much speed is the right speed?

I am reminded of the billionaire’s famous words,”640k ought to be enough”. As the things stand today it is increasingly clear that we need more and more computing power. For example, the increasing complexity of the games needs more RAM and processing power. (I’d settle in for a console though).

Hence, it would be difficult to quantify the need for speeds. People would put it to diverse uses as they deem it to be fit. Unless of course the content chokes the access. This only means that telcos would have to scale up bandwidth manifold. Which I don’t see as “happening”.

In the comments section on CNET wirte up (which I came across the link via Digg), the whole thing seemed like a conspiracy by the entrenched telecom operators. How far is this true is not known; but they do hire publicists in the media to “educate” customers. However, with rampant file sharing, the ISP’s would be forced to cut back on access speeds. Something that BSNL/ MTNL or anyone else is damned scared of if this trend catches on in India. We are speaking of a handful of minorty (in customer’s terms) who is into hacking firmware for port forwarding et al.

Hence, this seems to be a debate between the classical haves (as customers) and have nots (as telecom operators). Who wins the final round? This time would tell.

BSNL Broadband and “Technical Support”

Published on 25th May 2006 in General Thoughts. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , .

BSNL customers have been facing a problem with the web access over the past few days. The whole online access is on a slow crawl like a tortoise with bleeding piles. Of course, the technical backend has no idea as to what calamity has struck them.

The web access seems saner as of today morning. I was inclined to believe that there was some problem with my Linux box/ settings and imagined the doom’s day scenario of some rootkit/ virus/ spyware clinging on to it like ticks on dog skin.

This isn’t related per se to Broadband access but well Indians are being derided all over the Internet for all their “ingenuity” for technical solutions. Sushubh had problems with the hosting solution which seems to be solved somewhat. A bit more “research” and Sushubh pointed towards a direct review of the dudes in Bluehosting here. What pormpted this entry was the mail from Blue Host. It just reminded me that since BSNL support guys (or top dogs) read this blog for the “honest kickbacks”, they should make their “customer care executives” learn this by rote:

“We have received your support call. Great technical support is what sets us apart from our competitors. We will respond as quickly as we can to resolve your issue.”

This would indeed be the “joke” of the year. Support calls never reach the right persons and technical support is handled by a “juniour engineer” who has to extensively cross refer his “f***ing manual” to make some sense of the tripe. (This is inspired by the common tripe by the folks in IRC who say rtfm or read the F***ing manual). Just to be doubly sure, they have a free telephonic backup with someone who is even more confused than them.

The process of evolution ditched them somewhere in between. Part of their brains have been replaced by equivalent of mashed up potatoes. Getting the work done from them is equivalent of getting a full fledged rectal examination.

Why do we have to pay these people out of public funds?

(A Disclaimer here. This cannot be generalised on every one. I know of a person in Hyderabad who is intent on helping the customers out whenever he can. He stays online, guides us to the possible solutions and last heard was very keen on setting up a CRM solution for his division. Such gems are rare breeds who have made the unwise decision to stick to a Government job; they can easily rise and shine somewhere else. I have mentioned this because BSNL should honour these guys for making it more palatable of what otherwise is a lousy stew. Before I end, this guy is a open source geek and intent on spreading usage of Linux. May his tribe increase!)