I don’t like to be optimistic. Like every “big” story, there are loads of failures to dampen your interest in the “revolution”. For one simple reason. Even if the potential is there, it is not touching our lives at all. A lot of bull shit is being bandied about the ‘emerging” India, all the while ignoring the ground realities.

Mobile tarriffs are supposed to be the “cheapest” in the world. Agreed. They are indeed cheap as compared to the dollars abroad. It still doesn’t make any iota of sense to extrapolate the Western data on to a third world nation. We are billed on a per minute basis; I am told that per second billing would perhaps introduce a lot of complications in the billing. Imagine the huge amount of unused minutes the companies earn when someone talks for just first 5-6 seconds of the minute.

We are mired in the regulatory maze, the final authority being vested by the babu drawing his/ her own ideas about the regulations without taking care of the customer’s interests. The companies have opaque ownership patterns, foreign investors are playing havoc with the security, a free for all access being awarded to Pakistanis and Chinese of all hues.

Broadband is still stuck in the “faster than a dial up mode” and for all the brouhaha about the long distance rates falling, the pulse rate on the calls has decreased considerably which more or less makes up for the lost “usurious” call rates of yore. We still pay the jazziah to the sarkari motherf*****s without any respite.

All these facts are swept under the carpet.

Mobiles indeed have been the forefront of the social change. No second thoughts about it. However, I’d be clearly betraying my class conciousness when I’d say that even a rickshaw puller has a mobile. Riding on the upfront costs as ‘administrative charges’, I fail to understand the value it creates. Even with a huge prepaid user base (most of it cooked up and riding on fake connections), it has failed to provide a succour to the common man as technology enabler.

Presently, most of the companies are relying on so called “value added services” to drive their revenues. Hand in glove with the media, they are creating specific niche of programming which entinces the people to loosen up their pockets. While it may be argued in terms of matter of choice and smart marketing, I do foresee a nation on mentally retarded idiots who are stuck in the old groove of being “good for nothing”.

Why does India’s demography excite the marketeers? Don’t you realise that our growing population is going to be a frigging nightmare of monumental proportions? Even if you are a die hard believer of Malthusian school of economics, the eventual downfall is out there in cold. Mobiles cannot be sold to half dead, naked, out of work populace. Which is indeed the story of today.

Presently, as per the estimates, 40% of the Indian land mass is covered. I don’t have the means to verify because I guess this ‘information’ is classified. Rural areas are still out of the ambit of any decent coverage and as I have argued in these columns ever and ever again- Internet connectivty shouldn’t be wireless.

Before I conclude, I’d like to quote from a write up that appears in The San Jose Mercury News link from Atanu’s write up)

“In the next five years in India, nobody is going to get a land line,” said Sanjay Swamy, a former Silicon Valley executive who is now chief executive of mChek, a Bangalore start-up whose software allows people to use their cell phones as credit cards.

Wow. We could give this idiot a benefit of doubt. Of course.

Even if we have fabcrication units in India, the next Intel/ AMD isn’t going to come out of India. You could have low end ‘assembly plants’ here and no one in their right minds are going to send across the plans for designing the next “dual core” crap.

Life is mean bitch. Sadly some people tend to forget that.

One in every third prepaid subscriber is fake. If this isn’t “chilling”, it ought not to be to you dear readers because I have been asserting here that the valuations of these companies have been artificially bloated.

Of course, it wouldn’t be affecting the execs in their plush offices because it is the deceit that keeps them comfortably on their asses. During a routine criminal investigation in Haryana, the police discovered huge number of connections in a single person’s name. After further probes, they discovered that a number of telephone connections had been booked in the name of fictitious entities. In simple lay man’s terms it means that anyone could potentially “misuse” the phone numbers without the fear of being traced.

The Haryana police booked a couple of Airtel employees and it took considerable resources (my guess) to avoid a PR disaster for them. The whole matter seems to be subdued and suppressed and talked off only in hushed up tones. It is not getting the attention it deserves. By rough estimates, if the proper physical verification takes place now, it would shave off one third of the numbers which the companies gloat about. No wonder, Ramachandran, COAI chief, is keen only for the random verification of the subscribers. They cite huge logistics problems for the same.

This has grave implications for the internal security of this nation. In the name of driving up subscritions and ramping up subscribers, the norms have been thrown out. It didn’t apply to them in the first case either.

Getting a pre paid is simple. One has to furnish a “proof” of residence/ photgraph. That’s it. No questions asked. The “verification” is done at the level of the shopkeepers who is supposed to know the local residents. A little “consideration” and things get rolling for a new connection. Prepaids cannot be traced to the original subscribers and the SIM card can be destroyed and a new one had.

Post paid norms are tougher and no wonder, I get to hear delays on the part of the companies to verify everything at their end.

This wouldn’t be solved overnight and is a clear cut violation of licensing norms. Why haven’t their licences been cancelled?

Reliance has huge investments lined up for the next 6 months. The planned wireline is being “final touches”; the prepaid service is on course and has been confirmed. I wonder as to why the marketing idiots are hell bent on committing harakiri by introducing an alien concept in a tried and tested post paid model. Still, they would need some rabbits pulled out of the hat from Anil Ambani owned Mudra to make it “appealing” to subscribers.

Broadband would have to wait till July end (tentatively) and the Mbps plans are no where around the scene. My “mole” in Reliance marketing office was at pains to explain to me about the “speeds” on dial up. Imagine. I could have puked there but held myself. He even claimed that video conferencing was possible on 256k line.Reliance isn’t getting any “talent” and they picked up the “smartest of the morons” available.

I wonder whether anyone from Reliance is reading this. If you have such employees who bull shit their potential customers, you are dead as a dodo. Specially the customers who blog.

September is the probable slated launch for Reliance’s Blue Magic or DTH service. I doubt. There hasn’t been much activity on ground as yet. Would Reliance appoint dealers to scale up? If yes, there should have been advertisements in the newspapers calling for the same. None. The existing Web World properties are now creaking. With peeling paint, broken chairs, crashing PC’s (running Windows- what else!), the only thing that is missing in web world is the smell of sweat and urine. And the web worlds lack any space for expansion to cater to the expected increased demand for Blue Magic. Anil Ambani would either have to appoint third party dealers (leading to mismanagement of the customer’s expectations) or scale up independently via company owned showrooms. This would obviously lead to duplication of costs.

DTH is a holy cow untouched by regulations and only dominant player in India is Subash Chandra’s Dish TV. There is a lot of bitching about the Digital Video Recorders (DVR’s) and their hopeless quality. However, this is a virgin market and the players are milking it for all it’s worth.

DTH needs a seperate post though.

Reliance would need all the marketing muscle it can muster to make it happen.

Finally though, Reliance is loosing it’s sheen. It may have the numbers (trumped up mostly), but this is backed by opaque clauses, absolutely nil transparency and billing glitches galore. The biggest drawback is to “outsource” the “core” billing collections to third parties who leave no stone unturned to make the experience as hell.

In my opinion, Reliance has to fight the perception of a company which doesn’t care.It is definitely a tough call; rebranding exercise or not. An ageing star brand ambassador cannot do anything about it.

(Update:This is edited version of what appeared earlier on in the morning. I was at the mercy of my electricity company and had to hurriedly “save” the post). Apologies).