This year draws to a close in another 3 days. It would not change anything except for the dates. I call this as perverted optimism because I keep on looking forward for some miracles. It’s truly a make believe fantasy world.

COAI finally mustered up guts and filed a lawsuit against Department of Telecom. As usual, the media was frothing at it’s mouth and made this the headlines. Reliance jumped in the fray and counter challanged DoT with their own version of lawsuits galore. It was free for all till they decided to call it sober down and indulge in some back room dealings. Lawsuits have ceased to make any more news for the time being.

Spectrum is the main cause of the “fights”. I have repeated this ad naseum and it makes no sense to highlight this fact that spectrum is a scarce resource and the way Government is frittering away it’s advantages should call for an open discussion. The fossilised babus are barely going to move their butts and would be happy to gather moss. The only people who are happy about the opacity of the laws are the lawyers.

Broadband is a non starter this year too. Airtel introduced their 8 Mbps plans with some assinine download limits. I believe that this seems to be a marketing strategy in order to create a buzz around their product. All the while, most people who sign up “shockingly fast broadband” (or whatever the ads claim), they would become aware of it’s potential. Which means that word of mouth publicity would get them more customers. I am not sure that this is their marketing strategy. I believe that this is stupidity of the first lot to make the available resources scarce and not catering to the existing pent up demand. In any case, their broadband pricing leaves a lot to be desired. Airtel has the bandwidth and the mojo and the works. Yet, it is staffed by perhaps one of the worst idiots who ever sat on a gold mine.

Tatas made a lot of news and perhaps for the first time they made it to the Asshole of the year on this blog. Congratulations to them on winning this coveted award and here’s hoping that they would keep up this record. They had their intentions set right and I remember reading in Business World about their grand plans to set up metro ethernet and their deals with Cisco. This was one off news and it wasn’t mentioned subsequently. VSNL lost it’s dominance in international distance calling cards and then Reliance gave them a good competition for international landing stations.

Speaking of Reliance, they made news for all the wrong reasons. They got into acquiring Adlabs and then fancied making movies. There was a talk of convergence and “lightening fast” broadband. (Notice the way they describe their pathetic products). So far, there has been NO shaking news about broadband; they are stuck in the 128k era. Ouch! Reliance has not ventured much in landline business and they are holding their cards close to their chest. At best, they set up shadown companies like Swan and Cheetah Telecommunications (what names!) to bid for the telecom licence.

Anil Ambani has been a true “also ran” in the marathon all the while trying to carve out some “niche” for himself. He knows that he is being compared to his elder sibling and when crores of accounted and unaccounted money is at stake, blood is thinner than water indeed. Mukesh was sensible to exit out from telecom and focus instead on retail and gas. It was Anil who still seems to be glamour struck (remember Tina Munim nee’ Ambani?) It shows for him.

HFCL Connect is a small time player along with Spice Communications run by Modis. They seem to have mustered up enough courage to apply for pan India licence and spread their wings. They remain, at best, marginal players and would interest the foreign companies in case they wish to set up shop here in India.

Hutch became Vodafone after protracted legal battle and it was a personal victory for Arun Sarin. However, the change of the name and rebranding has not changed anything with this company. I have been after them to improve the quality of their services but then nothing has changed. As usual.

I had expressed hope that the year 2007 would be the year of Broadband. However, this was not to be. This was more about spectrum wars, legal wranglings et a which I am sick of reporting here again and again. This has also resulted in slowing down of the posts here. I believe that the best news of this year is the announcement of number portability, initially limited to the metros. It would be scaled up at a later date to rest of the country. I hope that with low migration charges, the competition to retain the customers would be intense and it would be the quality of services that would speak for itself.

Let’s keep our fingers crossed.

Tags: Airtel, Anil Ambani, Broadband, Broadband pricing, Broadband SUCKS, COAI, Department of Telecom, DoT, DTH, Hutch, Idiots, India, Landline, Media, Reliance, Reliance Broadband, Spectrum, Tata, Tatas, Telecommunications India, Telecommunications India, Vodafone, VSNL

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!

Tags: 3G, Anil Ambani, BSNL, Business Standard, CDMA, COAI, DoT, GSM, India, Media, Mobile, MTNL, Opera, Reliance, Spectrum, Telecommunications India

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.

Tags: Broadband, COAI, data services, Department of Telecom, GSM, GUI, Hutch, Incumbents, India, IPTV, Media, Opera, Reliance, Spectrum, Telecommunications India, Vodafone