Tag Archives: BSNL

Broadband for UID : Aadhar

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I have never been a big fan of Nandan Nilekani. I came across thewhich aims to profile all the Indians.

It’s easy to see the bias of the author about the “impoverished” Indians but there is too much optimism about targeting the benefits. The fact that the Aadhar scheme doesn’t really address the basic issue of data privacy, it is too much of a gamble.

Nandan also mentions about setting up a massive server farm for the data requests. The lack of Broadband at the peripheral level has hampered the data collection (that was a no brainer); which means that the basics have not been sorted out. The article also mentions about the queries to the database and problems cropping up later to be fixed. If I am not mistaken, this is as dumb assholism as it can get. Reason? All potential issues need to ironed out before data collection on a massive scale is carried out.

In my opinion, having a fault tolerant broadband over fixed line is imperative. The growth of the mobile telephony and hence the crappy 3G implementation is not in the public interest. Given the price structure of the data plans, there is no way that a reliable network geared for the public good is utilized for it’s need.

At the same time, public service networks like BSNL/MTNL need to be flogged for dragging their feet for missing the rural broadband plans. Wimax/LTE etc are good enough in theory but there is a theoretical limit to the extent of the data that can go through wireless.

Aadhar scheme is a hair brained exercise; much like the emperors clothes. Useless in execution with purported benefits not spelled out and absolutely no word on the data privacy.

AT&T Shocker: Buying T Mobile

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This is equivalent of Vodafone India buying up Loop/Videocon + other smaller players who got in the “telecom business” because they could encash the spectrum deal. It is a basic premise, should not take long to understand.

A lot of “influential idiots” are not happy about it because it spoils their ecosystem. The big network wheelers and dealers would have deal with a giant monolith and they would not be able to get the same “rates” as they would get otherwise.

Its difficult for me to base any comment on the merits of the case since I am not an expert nor US market is the focus. But it is a bad omen for this country to have international players in the country (can anyone give me any reason as to why BSNL cannot be made proactive) and they are messing up with public property.

I agree to an extent that teledensity has improved with entry of private players. Yes, BSNL has been a failure. Its a pathetic useless company to deal with. But at least it’s publicly owned. The point here is that BSNL could have been made to sweat out, be made to work. It wasn’t done. And then, you don’t have a legislative framework to keep the consumer interests paramount. The regulators have their heads up their ass.

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Mobile Internet: Opera gets leg space in App store

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Forget the statistics, the “key words” or even foward looking statements. Although strictly not under the purview of the blog, mobile Internet has attracted the attention of lot of people. Even though, it cannot support the applications that a true broadband needs (due to inherent limitations of medium), it is perceived to be cheaper than laying down optic fibre cables. The existing mobile towers can be rejigged and made to serve the customers with fewer incremental investments.

In any case, this again is a reflection of state of mobile internet in India. Opera has launched Appia powered Mobile App Store which would serve the needs for “apps”. I am not aware of how the apps are coded but perhaps they are platform agnostic.

Opera Mini is on a roll. Not only they have a clear dominance in over 200 countries but a simple elegant Java powered mobile app is awesome. I have used it on my Android and can testify to it’s usefulness. Infact, it is easy to download and run it on an emulator and use it tethered to your GPRS handset.

Mini has also been sucessful over it’s mobile counterparts (or something like BOLT which are alternatives in mobile space) for one simple reason; it’s ability to compress the data and serve it to end user. So far, they have not mentioned about the huge amount of data flowing in through their data centre but nevertheless, they would be willing to scale up, build profiles (if I am not mistaken, best way out would be individually numbering each download) and then serve it up for targetted advertisments. It is all a matter of scale.

On the flip side, it’s petition in EU against Microsoft has not really worked “the wonders” that it was required to. It’s desktop share is still a pathetic 2% worldwide despite being ahead in the innovation game. I am using Firefox 4 presently (nightly builds) and can testify that it is one of most significant advances in the history of open source browsers. Though Web Kit based browsers are cool (over proprietary engines like Presto- which again is a matter of debate), I can see some real heavy lifting done by Firefox; be it in extension development or all around stability fixes.

At least, on my Linux Mint installation (with a few other extensions) it is a great product; in consonance with Thunderbird, the migration to Open Source is complete.

Getting back to Opera, it still needs to tone up it’s work flow. At least, that seems to be a despondent mood on the forums/ news groups. After sticking out years crowing about web standards (yes, they are important) but persistent arguments about Acid 3 compliance and being the “fastest” out their are wearing thin. I care not about the fancy “tests” for they have no meaning for me as far as the page is rendered on my useless BSNL. I see the lag where it matters the most and is hurting Opera users.

Still, I wish them the best for their app store which would be a significant gain of revenues; it could have been implemented with some form of micropayments (which would be a pain to implement it) in an ecosystem where there is no clear defined “way out”. App based advertisments (like Angry Birds for Android) is surely a way to go.

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