These bozos cant maintain a website; what kind of services are they planning to offer?
Tag Archive for 'MTNL'
At times the bozos sitting up and making rules seriously surprise me. They have called for implementation of Internet Telephony and Carrier Access Codes.
This was mandated much earlier way back in 2001; however, this was opposed by Bharti. Reliance had entered with the premise of “death of distance” and had made STD calls ridiculously cheap. At that time, Dhirubhai Ambani was still alive and Mukesh and Anil Ambani were still brothers in arms.
If Internet telephony is implemented in it’s present shape, it would see present rates crashing down to a large extent. It would give a new lease of life to ISP’s like Sify and other fringe lunatics to scale up investments. I can foresee the entry of players like Skype as well as other SIP players which rely on open standards. It’s hard not to imagine the real gains to economy as a whole and it would benefit the adoption of setting up of WiFi hotspots on a larger scale.
Carrier access codes means that one can choose his/her service provider and each of the incumbent telecom operator in fixed line business has to provide that option. It means that you can choose Airtel landline to use BSNL’s calling cards to call up you mother in law in Timbuktoo. Granted that mother in laws should remain far away without casting their evil eyes on their kids…..
The major player that’s going to get hurt is BSNL (and MTNL). Unless, they improve their services which are required in the present set up, people are going to abandon them like rats on a sinking ship.
Although, this isnt new and TRAI has probably dusted off it’s old files from it’s dingy offices, still, all compliments to them to even think of doing such a thing. This comes as a breath of fresh air indeed.
I thought I would post this interesting observation by a member of the India Broadband Forum. The user tried asking for support by sending an email.
But the message was not delivered coz apparently the support email id had no space left on the MTNL servers.
He ended up getting this message:
Recipient address: triband.helpdesk@ims-ms-daemon
Original address: triband.helpdesk@mtnl.net.in
Reason: Over quota
I got a call from an executive offering me 1 Mbps unlimited for 2222/- per month. He said that this scheme was for “select” priveleged customers and is valid for a short while. Oh gosh. 1 Mbps unlimited..!
This only confirms my suspicions. Airtel had used the 512k unlimited as a bait and wanted to “test market” the response to the “top up” offers. This, in my opinion, only serves to entince more people towards the unlimited offerings. I feel that the current price for 1 Mbps is over inflated and it should be brought down to about 1000/- price band. Trust me, the whole existing subscriber base of MTNL would want to sever off their private parts to get hooked on to something like that. As if it really makes a difference….
Airtel has the moolah and they have the network. They can easily take the initiative and soft launch it. As I had mentioned before, word of mouth publicity would do more good. They can upscale their networks in response to the demand, schedule customers (like me) who deserve more bandwidth because suddenly I have discovered that You Tube videos stream so smoothly on the new bandwidth and it has been a discovery of all sorts watching those re runs of Tom and Jerry cartoons.
If only these morons listened….they’d get a very positive feedback from this blog. I promise 
Of course, the scheme gets extended to whole of the country where Airtel has it’s presence.
Ever since it has introduced the new 512k unlimited plans (much to my delight), I was struck by the stupidity of the dimwits that Airtel has hired. Airtel has a fantastic infrastructure because it was not weighed in by the legacy initiatives of the older sloths, MTNL and BSNL. It introduced 8 Mbps broadband speeds with download limits that anyone would piss on. It would find some eager beavers to taste the “speeds” but it remains useless to ponder on that.
I feel that the “top up” thingy should be declared illegal because you have two plans running concurrently offering the same speeds. They should migrate the existing customers to the present price plan because it makes no sense to pay higher prices for something that doesnt cost much. No one is willing to look into this because the company and the regulator seem to share the same relationship as a client and a prostitute. As long as the right money comes in, the whore mongering goes on with everyone looking at the other way. Unfortunate.
Either way, I have been arguing that the current prices donot reflect the existing price slabs across the world. Most of the major telcos in the developing world have shifted away from the 256k plans and have focussed on higher bandwidth options. Further, the prices across the spectrum are way to expensive in terms of purchasing parity; which effectively means that there is an open loot going on.
Airtel can easily slash down the prices for access; offer unlimited plans with bundling of voice calls and along with that create demand to cater to the new customers. Airtel still advertises mobiles as a lifestyle product; it should be placed as something utilatarian instead of being aspirational. Thats the whole irony of it. Dimwits have access to bucket loads of cash to burn.
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!
This is a first from telecom company. MTNL ties up with Novatium for low cost PC’s. It only affirms what I had been asserting long time back. The hardware is incosequnetial and the real growth of broadband can only take place if the telecom firms sell their broadband as a service concept rather than an add on to the plain vanilla service. This only would make the service viable.
Novatium does away with the basic CPU as you know of. All the computing takes place at the central server which serves as a hard drive. So in effect you just connect the system to broadband and access the web. This makes sense for India because this model is based on sound economic fundamentals. I am glad that Novatium is getting the required media attention; for long they have been languishing in the background. If I am not mistaken, it’s run by Rajesh Jain, the guy who made crores after he sold his portal to Sify for a whopping 400+ crores during the height of dot com boom. It’s another story that Sify turned his magic into a wasteland.
He chose to slowly invest his money in ventures like these and runs a popular blog called as Emergic. Even though it runs on yucky Movable type platform, I still enjoy some of his write ups.
Novatium would surely be a project to watch out for. I really hope that BSNL picks up this idea and rolls out a nationwide service. Telecom operators would then become true blue service providers.
I hope that they iron out the chinks like uptime of the availability of the platform. I assume that the service is also prone for breakdown if the telephone goes kaput. MTNL is known for it’s customer apathy and I dare not venture in it’s smelly offices. Further, Novatium would have to recoup their investments. Interestingly, they offering a choice between Linux and Windows platform. If linux can get a mainstream exposure, I am sure that it would do a world of good to them.
Some one from Ubuntu India should contact these guys to roll out preloaded Linux boxes. It is a breeze to learn the new desktops and for a person who has never been exposed to computers, it would be the right thing to do; unless one is forced to unlearn crappy windows and learn Linux from a scratch.
