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For long, I have felt the need to do a “consumer survey” which is motivated by real customers than the paid for shit stuff that most telecom operators crow about. It is impossible to capture data from the cross section of the user population and the retards who crowd on the forums would not be able to grasp the import of this exercise.

I realize the difficulties inherent in this exercise immediately. First and the foremost is lack of actual “complaint data”; TRAI does put up the figures online but there is a mechanism where these operators have to report back the action taken on the complaints. This is a good mechanism but I don’t see it enforced or whatever TRAI does, they are clueless idiots to make this data work for a better policy formulation.

Ditto for the existing delivery of the complaint mechanism. An aggrieved customer calls the operator in call center, is given a complaint number (not always) and no time frame for the resolution. I am presuming that their workflow is designed for the said purpose. Like any corporate organization working on “cost savings”, this is possibly “outsourced”. A smart team utilizes “dumb terminals” clogging up the bandwidth for most of “executives”. All the while, these brainless sods make the customers wait even more utilizing the spectrum.

This is a “presumption” but this workflow is bound to keep the customers “unhappy”. Billing and metering issues are definitely top of the list; unfortunately, even these thorny issues are not resolved in their entirety.

What needs to be done? Actually, this could easily be a dissertation exercise, capture and visualize the data and present a solid case report to the telecom companies. However, the implementation needs money and I am unlikely to see any movement on that count.

I could help with some possible criteria; reach me on the email (under “contact”).

One more thing. Reliance, Aircel and Airtel easily top the shit list.

Related articles

• TRAI: Maximum Subscriber Complaints Over Last 3 Years Against Airtel Followed By Reliance and Vodafone (telecomjunction.wordpress.com)
• India sends notices to Aircel over network roll out – official (reuters.com)
• India’s Telecom Regulator Proposes Quota for Local Equipment (pcworld.com)
• DND registry (manavaidurai.wordpress.com)

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I have always supported Community Wifi Access. This is because mobile broadband is useless for heavy duty applications. 3G access is a passe’.

Aircel has not responded to my queries and neither I am interested to follow them up. I had earlier emailed them about the promotion of mobile apps. It isn’t clear how they were developed and what platform is supported.

But I was genuinely surprised to see their advertisements in main stream media for Wifi access through smart platforms (phones/laptops/tablets). Although the adverts did allude to a “rosy picture”; it is not entirely clear as to how they propose to pull it off with no identified “backend”. More so, it is important that Wifi needs to be scaled up to residential areas so that they enough traction to call the shots as well as have a positive spin off on their recently launched 3G options.

I rarely cover the mobile Internet on this blog. Part of the reason is my antipathy towards a highly inefficient medium of communication that has been sold as “standard”. As well as persistent ad spends to try and increase usage. The real shit is in Broadband folks and we don’t see any action on that front.

Nokia India is seeing a decreasing market share because it is staffed up by inefficient morons who have no clue where the technology trends are heading for. Even on their “low end 3G handsets”, I don’t see mention of Opera Mini, a Java based browser, but their inane persistence towards technological harakiri. Hence the rise of alternative technological platforms to access mobile internet.

Even in the huge market, the per capita consumption is barely 7MB per month which may be true (reflects my own usage on Docomo that I have). The idea behind having Mini installed is that it efficiently compresses the page before it is rendered on your handset. Nokia has not been able to get ANY traction in this market and Opera is seeing millions of page views per month through it’s data centre.

This of course worries me as a Desktop user. Even though it grows in popularity in mobile space and earns revenue from Google for it’s searches, it does not seem to have a spill over in the desktop segment.

Although they have done everything to open up the extensions framework but it seems that it is bound to be doomed the way Opera Unite/ Opera Widgets were. There is no palpable excitement in the blogosphere about this.

Apart from this, IMHO, mobile internet has a huge potential to grow in terms of “apps”. These little widgets are a rage and out of all the mobile operators only Aircel seems to be doing something right. At least they have created a framework for the same to spur on internet usage. To be honest, I haven’t seen their application in real time but their advertisements are a pointer towards the same. Yet, if they were REALLY smart, they would open up their application framework