Tag Archives: S Band

Suddenlink Offers Users A Usage Meter – To ‘Educate’ Them About How Much Bandwidth To Use

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Cable operator Suddenlink Communications hasn’t yet imposed metered billing, but users in our Suddenlink forums note that the company has provided a new usage meter aimed at “educating” paying customers about their usage. Like most of these education campaigns, the meter provides users with a monthly stat-shot of their usage compared to other customers, and if they’re heavy users — sends them this warning suggesting they’re either infected with a virus, need to pay close attention to their P2P programs, or have a household member who is leaving a streaming music player running that “consumes bandwidth without anyone benefiting from it.”

Suddenlink argues the average user consumes 78GB a month, though they also suggest that around 25 GB of monthly consumption is a reasonable limit. Like companies eager to suggest their caps are more generous than they are, Suddenlink measures this 25 GB in things like e-mails sent — arguing 25 GB equates to 1.5 million e-mails — an intentionally misleading metric in the age of cloud services, online backups and HD Netflix streaming.

Sometimes these “soft caps” really are designed to simply give consumers a better understanding of their usage patterns in the hopes of voluntary congestion reduction. Other times, these meters are the opening marketing salvo ahead of a shift to hard caps and per MB or GB overages. We’ll keep you posted on which this is.
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S-Band Spectrum Scam India: ISRO in the dock

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It does not bode well for a country whose appointed Prime Minister (or whatever he fancies himself) whimpers and cowers and professes helplessness at the misdeeds of what is happening in and around. We live in charged situations and things are deteriorating at a rapid pace.

Corruption and nepotism is order of the day. So well, this S Band is a needed for “wireless broadband” and since spectrum is a scarce resource, there is money to be made at public expense. The deal is simple. Create a shell company, buy spectrum (or have it arranged to be transferred) and sell the equity to a foreign investor.

In effect, the foreign investor may be Chinese, American or of any hue or color. By a simple stroke, these guys get a toe hold in the state of security, a backdoor entry for them. In event of war, when communication needs would be paramount, these bastards would simply cut us out.

Hence, despite the huge brouhaha about the charges sticking out, the “zero sum game” of the losses and the “tamasha”, people are fed up. Although, I still don’t see any signs of “mass upheavals” all around barring perhaps the Chinese armed terrorists called as Naxalites and the on slaught of cheap human labor and sex traffickers from Bangladesh.

Therefore, The Statesman has correctly identified the Sunday Special as S Band Spectrum Scam and analyzed it’s ramifications.

I quote:

Devas was conceived in secrecy by an “incestuous” relationship with ISRO. Most of its board members and senior employees are former ISRO personnel who provide inside information. The deal was masterminded by three former scientific secretaries of ISRO. The ISRO headquarters is very much chairman-centric and of late has become a den of corruption and favouritism. They misrepresented facts to the then secretary, department of space, and misled the Space Commission and the Union Cabinet. The fact that a very one-sided contract was signed by Antrix with Devas on 28 January 2005 was never disclosed to the Space Commission or the Union Cabinet.

This is the reason why the news has gained so much prominence.

Here is a shocker (with my emphasis).

The S-band spectrum, defined as radio waves with frequencies that range from 2 GHz to 4 GHz, was allocated by the World Radio-communication Conference for terrestrial mobile communications services in the year 2000. Armed with this confidential information, Devas is supposed to have developed a novel commercial application in association with global experts and approached for S-band spectrum allocation at a throwaway price. Under the legally binding agreement, Devas would pay Antrix a total of $ 300 million over a period of 12 years. The cost of building the two satellites, GSAT-6 and GSAT-6A would be Rs 416 crore. The launching cost is extra. ISRO had approached Arianespace, a European consortium, for the launch of GSAT-6 because of delays in its own satellite launch programme. The hidden benefit of the use of 70 MHz S-band spectrum, according to the Comptroller and Auditor-General of India, would be more than Rs. 200 lakh crore.

If this is not good enough, the author has made a clear case of why the guilty needs to be punished.

The emerging requirements of S-band spectrum by strategic government organizations and societal needs were ignored. Defence minister AK Antony woke up to the S-band requirements of the Army, Navy and Air Force only after the Cabinet decided to annul the deal. “The government is now conscious of the necessity of giving the required capability to the armed forces, paramilitary and other strategic organisations,” he said.

The author goes on to provide instances of serious national security lapses.

Between January 2005 and July 2010 Devas was busy selling the capacity to foreign vendors, getting foreign investment board clearances, attempting trials without witnesses and waiting for European technology to mature which they could sell as their own technology. It offloaded 17 per cent of its stakes to Deutsche Telekon (Singapore) for $75 million. In short, attempting bigger frauds and covering their tract as the satellites were getting ready.

Hence the big issue remains of “money laundering” by the established players, loss of paper trail and the likes.

It’s a pathetic scenario indeed.

Response to comments

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I have been having a very interesting exchange of ideas with Mathew Carley who is the owner of Hayai Broadband. He needs no introduction on the forums and I owe a lot of good deal to him. However, I must defend the user’s perspective and a blog post follows.

He writes:

1. FUP is not illegal, and there is nothing legally wrong with what any ISP is doing when it wants to keep it’s network under control – it is perhaps unethical to advertise a broadband plan as “unlimited” and apply an FUP. I prefer (and use) the term flat-rate, which refers to pricing, not usage.

TRAI, the regulator defines Broadband as “always on with a speed of 256kbps”. They have supported this definition that has been taken from ITU web site. The whole point here, from an end user’s perspective is that the definition has remained static. I think the FCC definition has also remained stuck here. However, the push for “faster speeds” has mainly come from academia and the realization among the telcos that serving content through their dumb pipes can be very lucrative, net neutrality be damned.

All the more they ALSO realize that it pays in the long run to get the customers hooked on to “speeds” AND “content” and then make money out of “traffic shaping” and the works.

Yet, if you look at the pdf from ITU (opens up a link in your pdf viewer), do check out the page 19 (under pricing) where it clearly states the success of South Korea broadband has been because of “flat rate”.

Here BSNL (others and your probably included) have different tiers with a “limit”. Now this limit can be argued. As I had mentioned that majority of your users would be content with social networking / email you would hardly see the “abuse” of network. However, BSNL is a public service. Which means that the network effectively belongs to public and for arguments sake has no say in the way it overlords it. Thats my opinion.

You would be owning the fiber and its for you to come out with what ever plan/ideas you wish to.

As far as TRAI is concerned, it does NOT mention the word “fair usage policy” which is again in contravention to license terms (as all the ISP’s are regulated by TRAI/DoT) and hence ILLEGAL. So you are right too except that it sugar coats the bitter pill.

2)

Many sites – even many India-centric sites, are hosted abroad. This is where the “strain on the networks” usually comes in.

Yes, I know it. Koreans have much of it hosted inside the country because they are not too comfortable with English. Duh. We are among the largest speaking country in the world by the way; still it is not a huge net market.

3) BSNL only has an International cable between India and Sri Lanka – it doesn’t have any going anywhere else. It buys almost all of it’s bandwidth from VSNL – 65% from VSNL/Tata India, 14% from GlobeInternet (a subsidiary of Tata in North America), with the rest from a small assortment of other ISPs both domestic and foreign through it’s various arrangements.

Thanks for letting me know this. I am waiting for official confirmation including the break up of prices.

4. We can safely assume that they’re anticipating about 300GB of usage on their FTTH plans, at Rs10/GB. Cheaper than what I can get it for, but they’ll already be getting the volume discounts I’m aiming for.

Network usage varies WILDLY. I cannot nail even an “AVERAGE USE” but well, it can possibly be predicted once the metrics are clear, the amount of traffic flowing in your fiber and the works.

7. If you’re an ADSL customer, 768kbit/s is pretty much all you’ll get out of a DSL line anyway, unless you’re really close to your DSLAM. ADSL2+ is meant to go up to 3.5mbit/s upload speed, but in NZ I’m 300m away from my cabinet on fairly decent quality lines, and I barely hit 900kbit/s. Since the default upload speed they provide I think is 256kbit/s and you purchase more upload in 256kbit/s increments, this probably is to cover their ass so as to prevent people from trying to buy 1 or 2mbit/s upload and then getting about 768k.

Thanks! The wording on the web site sounded as a “limit” without mentioning the technical reason. Let them confess in writing that it it still is ADSL and then I can question them as to why it is taking delay in introducing ADSL 2. I can file as many as RTI’s I want!

@operamaniac Right of way and civil works costs a fortune. I mean that quite literally – about 75-80% of our laying of fiber to homes goes towards these two things: the fiber and equipment to run the network are negligable costs by comparison, and since it can be crores per kilometer, it won’t take many kms of fiber for us to reach 1,000 crores.

The sad fact. It is the job of municipalities to lay down fat ducts throughout and just offer it to the end users. Simple. Far sightedness is not a virtue in this country. It comes at a premium from those who are NOT in this country.

Interestingly here’s something from Wikipedia entry for ‘Internet in Japan’. It says and I quote:

Operators struggle to maintain enough bandwidth to allow maximum usage of the service by customers. Even the largest operators have capacities in the region of tens of gigabits while customers with gigabit FTTH services (or higher) may number in the thousands. This problem is further compounded by limits caused by internal router bandwidth. Estimates of traffic based on data collected in May 2007 by the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications set total network usage at approximately 720 Gbit/s combined. The report further states that by May 2008, total traffic will exceed 1 Tbit/s.

Woooo. But then these are 2008-09 figures. Similarly the ITU report that I alluded above is 2003. Much has changed in past 7 years; we are still stuck in the kbps and well….. Time to change the tune, the gears and tracks.

@ Operamaniac a.k.a. my dear web master. 3G is not in my radar right now. In fact, I wanted to ask them as to how they have utilized the USO fund and what is the state of broadband connections in the rural areas. I know for sure that they are spending disproportionately on 3G services and neglecting the land line when it should be reverse. Lets see how they react. At least it would be a basis for seeking legal remedy or anyone who wants to file a Public Interest Litigation.

Cheers!!