This announcement was something similar to a bamboo stick loaded up with chillies and thrust on their sorry orifices. The department of telecom seems to have woken up to the menace of the telecom firms. Mercifully better sense prevailed and spectrum allocation guidelines have been rationalised. Atleast in theory.

I was expecting and it happened. The COAI chief reacted on expected lines and cried foul. Reliance is waiting in the wings to get the GSM licence for pan India licence and is willing to fork out astronomical sums of money for the same. Real estate developer Parsavnath has thrown it’s hat in the ring.

All for a simple logic. The “relaxed” norms for the foreign ownership is bound to attract the global majors. We have already seen Vodafone owning up the Hutch brand. It makes sense to scale up a brand new service, share towers with the existing incumbents and then sell out at a profit. What else explains this? It isn’t the crap aboout the “fastest” growing market but for the existing segmentation of the customer base. It becomes easier to identify a set customer base and lure them with a better service offering than their existing service provider. All the while it’s the incumbent that spends huge amount of adver tising to get them on the network, the new players lure them with “better offers”. More so, I feel that it might be as well that Indian market may get to see the segregation of the services. For example, we might have new players exclusively for data services rather than plain vanilla voice applications.

It is now being whispered in the Indian media about the inflated subscribers; a fact that I have been talking about ever since this blog came into existence.

It’s more than 3 quarters of the year now. No new initiative on the broadband front except for the customary noises about IPTV. Bah. What do customers really need?

So far, Raja (our “hon’ble” minister) has not been able to exert himself. He remains a pale shadow of former M(o)ara(o)n. If the Indian Government falls to the blackmail of the screwed up commies, expect our broadband dreams to be rolled back by another decade. Most of the operators would hold it because they would be more interested in knowing the exact “policy” of the new guy who warms his ass on the chair.

Madness indeed.

Finally, I am able to access Internet, courtesy Airtel. It’s just been installed in my premises after a tough fight with the dodos who had very specious arguments about “ports” and “pairs”. I literally had to throw a fit time and again to make it work out; all’s well that ends well. Despite the screw up in the final legs of installation, I must appreciate their professional approach to their new connection. There was a seperate team to collect cash on my doorstep, seperate team to install the wiring, another team to activate the voice line and finally an “engineer” to set up the modem.

I shudder to think of the time being spent in the dingy waiting hall of MTNL (I moved to New Delhi recently- thats a seperate story). Or wait for the lineman to appear at my doorstep. It was all over in a jiffy and I am online. It took 72 hours to connect me to the infobahn highway; minus the 36 hours it took me in the hospital doing my night duties.

I still have not been able to install my favourite Ubuntu on my new Lenovo laptop due to some quirk in not recognising the trackpad. I am at my wits end because the last time I had used it, it was absolutely flawless. I am forced to use Windows Vista which I am very keen to get rid off like an itch in my ass.

I shall get with the regular updates as and when I am able to have some iota of time at my disposal. Cheers and stick around for some exciting bitching of the first order!!