Daily Archives: 03rd Mar 2011

Adding a new section on Broadband News

This has been made possible by addition of Word Press Plugin called as Wp-O-Matic. Basically it fetches RSS feeds, parses it and adds the topical posts here. The main link is hyperlinked to the origin of the post.

The need was sorely felt because I am unable to post as much as I want to. Further, I strongly believe that the news should be updated on a continual basis so that the index remains fresh. This is experimental feature and has nothing to do with any kind of SEO. I strongly feel that DSL Reports is doing a great job of indexing the content across the blogosphere and very much keeping in focus with the aspirations of this blog too.

There is a lot that can be done with the RSS feeds; although I am interested in topical categorization on the main page itself but it amounts to huge amount of link spam which would only mess up the structure here.

The maximum limit is that of “10 feeds” based on a simple cron job (which does the heavy lifting of caching the content here) and to be honest I should have done it earlier. The only downside is the lack of “automatic application” of tags which would generate a lovely tag cloud…but there would be some solution lurking around.

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Broadband “upto” marketing

TRAI

Image via Wikipedia

Everyone is pissed.

And so does Tech Dirt claims that it would take over 10,000 years to change the ‘upto’ marketing hoopla in Broadband access.

The point here is that at least the regulators are talking about it. Here, TRAI is BLISSFULLY unaware of the issues! I wonder what the”consumer organizations” have to say about this.

Read More here.

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Facebook Could Finally Kill The SMS Cash Cow – And Carriers Will Hike Mobile Data Further As A Result


When Google Voice was first introduced, we noted how it really was only just the beginning of a new paradigm shift, where open devices and open networks allowed third party developers to develop services previously “owned” by network operators, including voicemail, SMS, or even dialing mechanisms. Push IM as an alternative to the carrier cash-cow that is SMS seems like an obvious evolution, and the Washington Post notes how Facebook recently purchased two mobile messaging companies, GroupMe and Beluga, that could speed things up. The report quotes Sanford Bernstein analysts that suggest this could finally force carriers to lower SMS prices:

(Sanford Bernstein analysts) said wireless data makes up only 9 percent of a carrier’s revenues while voice and texting bring in the vast majority of revenues. “The question is: how long will it be until this inefficiency is addressed?” wrote the Sanford analysts. “Just because there is demand doesn’t mean that consumers are willing to pay so much for a service that costs so little to the operator.”

Given that SMS is pure profit and costs virtually nothing to provide (given such signals travel over tower control channels anyway), this is inevitable, though it’s impressive carriers have managed to fight off the change for this long. Granted what you’ll save in SMS costs as open platforms kill off the concept of voice minutes and SMS, you’ll wind up paying in data prices, as carriers re-align (read: raise) mobile data pricing to counter the lost revenues.
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