A little while back, Rajesh Jain had run a “Big Idea for India” contest. He has touched on many issues in his previous posts; there was a lack of serious debate on Broadband. This contest was open to all; I had mailed my entry to Rajesh on his email.
He had received over 150 responses for the same.

Jain announced the winners recently; in which yours truly has also figured (the names are in an random order). The contest was judged by Jain and Atanu Dey (whose blog is linked to in the blog roll in side bar). Of course, he has been a huge influence in shaping up my thought process and I owe a lot to him.

The post, in it’s entirety follows here. For the regular readers, there is nothing new because I have already touched on these issues in the previous posts extensively.

This is one answer and highly underrated option. The following scenario is envisaged:

1) Optic fibres running across to get the data without caps. We need fibre to home instead of outdated copper. Last mile access is contentious; while opening up last mile for private players is contentious, this needs to be debated. Britain has opened it up under strict regulations and British Telecom has been forced to upgrade it’s infrastructure to retain customers.

2) Heavy public investment for scalable architechture. Not 3G guzzling up spectrum but community Wifi’s (pay per use or perhap involving the municipalities making the people accountable directly for the level of involvement).

3) Create an ecosystem of open source applications to harness ideas; make it easier for people to access services. (Open Source standards promote interoperability; closed source is meant for perpetual profiteering at public’s expense).

4) Opening up the Government’s accumulated data through API’s etc; create models around it. For e.g., data from GPS installed in public transport would easily display the estimated arrival time through SMS if needed on the mobile phones. (“Hacker culture” is missing in India; most of the Bangalore flotsam is moronic army of debuggers and script kiddies).

5) Teleconferencing would make it easier for people to people contacts; Gujarat has shown the way! Why can’t India have something similar to Skype? (There is a move to have something similar in the GNU world where encryption would be based on open standards).

6) Education sector would get a boost; not only invite faculty, stream educational videos, hold tele-sessions but teach kids for a wonderful world of Internet. (Pilot experiments in Bihar/Gujarat have been well received; the idea needs scaling up).

7) Spin off benefits from e-commerce applications.

The potential is huge; if you are planning it to share with BJP, the easiest way out is to break the ISP‘s monopoly, hold TRAI responsible for execution (not DoT) and revise Broadband definition to at least 2 Mbps (UNLIMITED, WITHOUT any caps).

Thanks Rajesh!

Tags: 1Mbps, 3G, 512k delights!, Access Deficit Charge, API, Assholes, Broadband, Broadband access, Broadband in India, Broadband India, Broadband pricing, Broadband SUCKS, Broadband Updates, BSNL Broadband, BSNL India, BSNL sucks, DoT, DTH, EDGE, fraud, Fraudband, gas belching old haggards, India, Indian Telecom sucks, Indians, Internet, ISP's, mainstream media, Mobile, mobile phones, Ofcom, Open Government, Open Source, open source applications, Opera, SMS, Social Issues, Spectrum, Telecommunications India, Telecommunications India, TRAI, Unlimited pricing, Wifi, Wireless, Wirless broadband

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.

Tags: 1Mbps, Airtel, Airtel Broadband, Bandwidth rules, Broadband, DTH, MTNL, Telecommunications India, Unlimited pricing

Verizon has introduced unlimited plans which was matched by rivals within 5 hours of it’s launch. For about $100 greenbucks, it makes no difference whether you call local or across the states.

Reliance had offered “death for distance” but somewhere along the line it has lost it’s pizazz. It ended up in cartelisation of the big telecom companies (with tacit media approval not to expose their claims) because shedding prices hurt everyone in the process. You could drop the prices to zero but then how would you monetise your investments? It flies against the grain of logic (everything did).

I believe, that locked in handsets with compelling price points could be the key to the further growth. There is indeed a huge mass of the population that has not yet been brought in the ambit and it is here that the marketing muscle has failed. There is a crying need to address such price points because thats where the next set of revenues is going to come. Slowly, but surely.

For the same reason, the Broadband initiatives need to focus on the value added services like gaming. Even though, it is fledgling industry as compared to say a market for condoms, still it offers a juicy alternative to plain vanilla voice calls. Broadband opens up a lot of oppurtunities; just that one has to apply himself to this.

Going back to the original argument, unlimted plan pricing would ensure that the networks remain primed to the mass of people talking to each other. However, it would lead to sore congestion across the metros where the networks are already under strain. Telcos can milk a certain subsection of the high paying population to introduce something similar to this. It need not create any hoopla but set up dedicated customer points for high net worth players and offer them incentives of various plans. A guirella tactic would help them play along by word of mouth which is much more effective means of advertising than having a prick like SRK trying to do the job for you as a mascot.

Tags: Advertisement, Advertising, Broadband, GUI, handsets, India, Indian Mobiles, Media, Mobile, Mobiles, Reliance, Telecommunications India, TRAI, Unlimited pricing, Value Added Services, Wireless