Tag Archive for 'CDMA'

Tatas: Selling their soul

Published on 15th Sep 2008 in Tata Indicom and Tats Communications. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , .

Poor idiots! They had to sell to DoCoMo, a leader in the 3G services. With the policy as announced, the duds had it in them. They had to sell out to the highest bidder. Very soon, the whole landscape of the Indian telecom would change. We would not have homegrown company like Airtel but instead this would be a battle ground for the big global majors to fight it out for customers.

The size of the deal is pegged at $1.5 billion (about Rs 6,700 crore), translating into a $6-billion (Rs 26,000 crore) valuation for the company that runs networks across the country and is planning to expand into GSM mobile services in the near future. Tata Teleservices is a loss-making company. Between 2005 and 2007, its cumulative losses stood at Rs 5,604 crore

This India story has been done to death many a times. There is no real addition of the 8-9 million customers per month. It is simply not possible. Most of the metros have choked and jammed. It is saturated. In order to expand into tier B and tier C cities, telcos need funds and assured returns. For all practical purposes, I dont forsee the market “hot and happening”; although the 3G services would assure monetised returns and would ride on the value added services.

It is no secret that Tatas claim their superiority of services based on some abstract benchmarks. There are people who would swear to God not to ever think of Tatas as their service provider. Frankly, TRAI has been unable to implement its own customer friendly norms; trying to get anything out of the useless idiots manning the customer service is a herculean task in itself.

Tata is a weathered story. They have lost it and the writing on the wall is as clear as the sunlight illuminating the dark dungeons of their minds. Telecom is a failed venture and they ought to accept defeat and ship out of business.

RCom India: Soft launch

Published on 04th Aug 2008 in Indian Telecom and Mobiles. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

Media reports are rife about speculation that Reliance Communications (RCom) has had a soft launch of their GSM mobile business. They have awarded a huge contract to Huawei (stupidity) and is being financed with Chinese money to expand their services. Incidentally, they own the company to lease out the towers for both the CDMA as well as the GSM services. It all remains in the “family”, so as to say. It’s pretty incestous.

I am eager to know about their service levels as well as their plans. They had shaken up the mobile industry earlier in their avatar and the space is all set to grow. Lets see how this unfolds.

Virgn India Mobile: Grey areas

Published on 14th Mar 2008 in General Thoughts, Indian Telecom and Mobiles. 3 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , .

Mobile Virtual Network Operator or MVNO is a “backdoor” entry in Indian telecom. Indian laws don’t allow this at all. Yet, Virgin India “tied” up with Tata and leased out their spectrum (? perhaps) and advertised here. Tatas claim that this is just a rebranding exercise. The email from the PR department didn’t sound so.

It has been a fiasco. Tatas feel that they can roughshod over the existing laws and garner a share of suckers who feel that it’s cool to get paid for incoming calls. Bah! How naive can people get? I believe, that one has to pay something upfront to “activate this service”. In any case, this is only product differential they have in an increasingly crowded market. With the eminent launch of newer services, this segment of consumers would surely weigh in gimmicks like these to purchase.

Their offer of handsets sucks. Although, this is good news for those who swear by CDMA. Department of Telecom has referred this matter to TRAI to look in the legal aspects of having Virgin Mobile.

Spectrum: Who wins the game?

Published on 19th Jan 2008 in Indian Telecom. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , .

Shobhana Subramanian of Business Standard has concrete numbers about Reliance winning the game of spectrum wars. Worth reading. Except for the fact that I had raised the same issues in my earlier posts and now you know why I was dead right about Ambani making it really big.

Apart from maximising the revenues, GSM would help them to acquire more customers. I am sure that they would want to leverage the power of GSM and CDMA networks and introduce consolidated billing. For example, they could offer wireless internet on CDMA and voice calls on GSM; some kind of a switching mechanism could be developed.

Unless Anil Ambani wants to call it quits and screw up. Who knows?

Indian Telecom: Spectrum war hots up

Published on 13th Dec 2007 in Indian Telecom. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , .

Airtel upped the salvo by offering 2000+ crores for the spectrum. This rattled the Tatas (who own perhaps the worst home ISP business) and Reliance and a full fledged media war broke out between the two “giants”. Tatas (and Reliance) claim that the GSM operators virtually got their spectrum for free and they should not be asked to pay for the same. They also want a technology neutral criteria for the telecom services; CDMA or GSM. The existing telecom operators are obviously shit scared of the new players in the market and hence the churn.

Let’s look at this from a different perspective and why the entry of Reliance and Tatas would affect the existing subscriber base. The telephone number portability has been announced and the plan would be affected perhaps by next year. Reliance and Tatas would roll out their services pronto pronto since they already own much of the infrastructure in form of manpower and physical assets. The GSM operators have gagged together in their rag tag association (even though their unity is in doubt) and are in effect an effective oligopoly. The entry of new players upsets their apple cart and they would be forced to introduce newer services to make themselves relevant.

On the other hand, this claim could be contested by the CDMA lobby because they have not done anything extra ordinary with their services. For example, no one single operator has a single sec pulse billing which benefits the customer. Suppose you talk at a strech for 5.03 minutes. You end up loosing the extra 57 seconds that remain unused. These are the extra seconds that are charged for without any accountability.

It isnt that the fossilised babus are not aware of the situation on ground. They have chosen to stay shut because their telephone bills are paid for by the taxpayers money. In any case, most of them end up being telephone consultants just like ex TRAI head Pradeep Baijal has done.

Hence, to round it off, I must admit that unravelling the telecom mess is bit like understanding a woman’s mind. I am not an expert but prefer to see things the way they affect us.

As the year draws to a close, the confusion in the telecom regulations persists. The ordinary paying customer is at the recieving end. As usual.

Indian Mobile Telephony: Mess galore

Published on 24th Nov 2007 in General Thoughts, Indian Telecom, Mobiles and Other Frustrated Customers. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , .

This was to be expected. The spectrum issues played out in the past fortnight in full public glare. I was following up the story in the mainstream press and this makes for a fascinating read; specially the way it brings the “saas bahu” serials to shame. It gave enough grist to the “telecom” specialists to throw their hats in the rings and make lofty pronouncements.

A quick low down of the ensuing events. According to the norms, the spectrum would be issued to the companies who garner the maximum share of the subscribers. This means that apart from the bloated number of subscribers, the whole mobile user base is a BIG suspect. The specturm wars broke out in the public because Raja wanted to ration the scarce resource and act God. There are often shispers of BIG money floating around but then that isn’t the focus of this write up here. At first, the government decided to relax the norms for spectrum allocation. In the meantime, it allocated 10 Mhz of “free” spectrum to the two upgly sisters, BSNL/MTNL. This was challanged by COAI, the motley coalition of the private telecom operators in TDSAT, which is tribunal body to decide the disputes. To add to the confusion in the midst was the huge number of applications that waited to get their turn for spectrum allocation. DoT decided to issue letters of intent to the new players.

In the meantime, the media jumped in the fray and raised the issue of 3G licences and there were various interpretations of the original licencing norms. Government of India thrives in controversy and no wonder that it was very happy to roll in the mud. The motley association was split right through the middle and they could not get their act quite right. After a couple of days, COAI made quiet noises about “settling” the 3G row.

Now comes the icing on the cake. Reliance got an entry in the GSM club by paying a paltry sum of 1600+crores and got their CDMA licence converted to some kind of a “universal access” crap. Whatever that means. Reliance’s entry in the cosy club and hence the scarce spectrum being gifted on the platter was too much for the association to digest. Anil Ambani and the rest exchanged verbal duels clothed in their gobbledegook. In other words, both the parties were fingering each other. When the war of words went out of hand, the DoT wanted to play Godfather and summoned the chiefs of all the telecom companies to “thrash out a solution”.

Raja realised that the game was clearly up and set up a shadow boxing competition. In effect, to announce as to who is the boss. Since there was no consensus on the telecom chief’s meet, he decided to get the PMO involved and had a smiling manmoron to back up his decision.

Thus ended the saga of the “spectrum wars”; the last word isn’t written as yet. I would wait for further news to unfold in the near future. Nevertheless, the mess persists and the ultimate looser is the public exchequer. Without going in detail about the merits of the case, I believe that this telecom mess would tangle itself like a hydra headed monster. No respite!

As usual, the watchdogs were quiet and it was only Business Standard who spoke out at length about the mess around here.

Phew!

Indian Telecom:Shift towards GSM

Published on 28th Oct 2007 in Indian Telecom. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , .

It was coming. I have been proved wrong on very few occassions (a fact that I am proud of) and one of them was about CDMA. CDMA is an acronym for Code Division Multiple Access. This was promised to be more lucrative for the telecom service provider as it enabled them for a quicker roll out. However, the patent owner Quallcom earned a revenue from every sale of the handset making the quicker roll out far more expensive as compared to GSM.

The recent shift of Reliance and Tatas towards GSM signals a “victory” for the spin doctors of the GSM lobby. With further and incremental improvements in GSM, the so called, 3G technology promises better data transfers which was presumed to be THE advantage of CDMA over it’s GSM counterparts. Rightly so. I have seen streaming video on my old trusty Samsumg Reliance handset which was unheard off for GSM. They had a dedicated portal for the colour handsets and as early as 2003/04 it was a ’status symbol’. They cost a cool 25k for a brand new handset.

Much has changed since then. I have opposed CDMA on the grounds that expensive royalty payments could be avoided by shifting to “open source” GSM or develop an indigenous mobile platform on lines of CDMA. The telecom companies could have easily developed a system for mutual use. The differentiation factor could have been the service levels or the value added services et al. Since we are a nation of bumbling morons, this did not happen.

Many eyebrows were raised at the way Reliance and Tatas were asked to pay up money for the new licences. The GSM lobby cried foul (rightly so for the first time) at the way these companies have been favourited. Reliance had even set up shell companies like Cheetah Telecom (can’t they think of something better?) to buy out the spectrum and hence scale up their valuation with the scarce resource.

Given the mess in this sector, it is obvious that Department of Telecom is going to play God for obvious reasons. The gold rush for the spectrum is still on and not surprisingly the GSM lobby is themselves to be blamed for. They had opposed the auctioning of spectrum when Ratan uncle had proposed this. The present mess is for all us to see.

Hence this is indeed a matter of speculation as to how this would sort itself out. We are all there to see the bloody circus out from the ring.