Bharti first denied and then offered $20 billion dollars for this company in South Africa. They have these laws which mandate than 20% of the marked up capital of a company (or shareholding pattern) should remain with Blacks. if Bharti manages to win this bid (and fatten the purses of the majority of the shareholders), it would be sixth largest combine in the whole world.

This would give it significant leverage for Network equipment and of course, access to global capital and lobby circuits. This should be good news, although I remain circumspect of its real intentions. I shouldn’t be surprised to know (or for that matter anyone) that we don’t know the exact state of Bharti’s profitability. They don’t declare their assets publicly (as far as I know) although, I have read news about their claims to profits. As they grow in size, they tend to acquire more monopolistic and bureaucratic attitudes and can easily ignore the growing customer user base.

Such a monolithic cannot be taken to task unless the Government steps in to protect the customer’s interests.

For the same reason, I have been opposing the mergers and acquistions; more players in the market doesn’t mean more choices for the customers. They would be scaling up infrastructure from ground up and cashing out to the existing companies; although the ones which have been granted licences recently, would be happy to comply rather than compete with stiff entry barriers. The existing players benefit from the incumbents spectrum. Although, there have been laws designated to avoid this; law is an ass and lawmakers are assholes hand in glove with them.

Hence, Bhart courting MTN is nothing new given the scale of money that it could find from it’s parent (Singtel); I have a strong reason to feel that Bharti is merely acting as a front for more sinister evil gameplans.

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.

This is an excellent write up on Business Standard (and luckily on Rediff). I reiterate all over again that Business Standard must improve it’s layout and content archival system. This does not befit a premium newspaper at all.

I quote selectively (emphasis mine):

Despite the free licence, less than half of India’s 338 ISPs have survived. Other ISPs have moved to niche markets. And some, according to TRAI and DoT, are untraceable. Government companies BSNL and MTNL control over 64 per cent of the market.

Unbundling the local loop and open and free entry for anyone to serve any size of area or population are considered sufficient conditions by regulators worldwide to seed booming Internet markets. WHAT THE F*** IS TRAI DOING?

Barring some early efforts, TRAI has been a helpless witness to the growing dominance of the Internet market by state incumbents. Access to network elements on cost-based charges is mandated in most successful Internet markets.

Internet telephony can be a boon for rural areas where most calls – with family members away to make a living in the city – are long-distance. TRAI wants all ISPs to be allowed to provide Internet telephony but in a restricted form – in which PCs may not call landline or mobile phones. This makes ISPs uncompetitive with the big telecom players. TRAI, however, proposes that telcos and ISPs pay the same annual fees to the government. (I had mentioned the same thing in my earlier write up here)

Rather than correct the failure of markets, the intention seems to be to shrink them so that bureaucrats have less work monitoring them. (No wonder. Government of India staffs morons of all hues).

Poor access to Internet and broadband is a sufficiently strong justification to amend the licence for cellular and unified access services to remove features, if any that cripple Internet and broadband growth.

The law empowers TRAI to recommend changes on grounds of public interest and advances in technology. The government and TRAI must wait no longer. (Public Interest? That is not foremost on their minds either!)

Comments welcome. But surely, this is indeed a dismal scenario.