There are excellent guides available to enable your wireless networking on your Debian and then choosing Tata’s apn to access the Internet. I would not go in those details. I had used a 3G stick and after ensuring the proper network coverage, on a Windows machine, added it to my Debian based laptop. Although recognized, it failed to connect on to network and neither there was any way to install the company issued dialer.

However, it worked fine in Windows world; it was auto-recognized and I could work on that. What I noticed was the horrible lag and the ping times, clearly making it useless for any one for online gaming. It’s next to impossible. At the same time, the video buffering was relatively smooth although nothing to write home about.

With pathetic “download limits” and huge costs, I had to nix the plan of going in for Tata Docomo; although I must confess that they have a reasonably good customer care. My point of contact has been their on line chat and their email’s work, albeit very late. This, in my opinion, is better than the other companies who don’t give a shit about after sales.

Would you go in for an expensive hardware and huge recurring monthly expenses? 3G is NOT for the data but for more efficient spectrum utilization. The voice market dominates because these operators have no intention of improving on the value added services.

Thats where their bread and butter lies. If 3G data services were really to become “cheap”, to so called “market forces” would determine the outcome. I find it amusing when people crow about prices coming down eventually. There would never be an “unlimited plan” because shoring up the capacity on wireless networks is a huge sunk in investment which is not easy to recover.

For the time being, this is a worst case alternative to a proper wireline/wifi model. If you don’t have any other frigging option in this heartless world, go for it.

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At best, the draft proposals sound what has been proposed; but the industry and their associations would definitely seek to water it down.  Any customer “friendly” variant is not welcome for obvious reasons. In any case, the draft policy (specifically on broadband) needs specific inputs rather than broad sweeping generalizations that cannot be fulfilled in the current scenario. The Government of India also needs to do away with self styled experts and focus on basics to understand the need to encourage the adoption of broadband.

Let me be honest. I haven’t read the draft proposal in it’s entirety. So I would prefer to link it to someone who has done it. As luck would have it, I stumbled again on Medianama  with their take on the proposed policy changes. I would only highlight the issues that I feel need to be addressed regarding broadband alone.

1) Definition of Broadband : Always on with a minimum speed of 2 Mbps and not as proposed  to be changed in the year 2015. This is because with the change at the centre, the policy decisions invariably get stuck in the red tape. The whole bunch of users have been clamoring for 2 Mbps as the basic benchmark in order to utilize the actual benefit of the broadband.

Why? Because 256 kbps is pathetic. You cannot video chat effectively. You cannot stream media applications. You cannot do zilch. Still, the definition remains stuck at mere “doubling” of the speed. 100 Mbps is a promised pipe dream.

2) There have been effective proposals for setting up interlink peer exchanges in India to replace NIXI. An excellent blog post (not written by me but Mathew), clearly details the methodology to achieve this.  The highlights (sic):

NIXI is supposed to be a non-profit organization (that part I believe), however it allows ISPs to essentially charge each other tariffs of Rs25 per GB. At 1gbit/s, with an in:out ratio of 3:1 and utilization of 80% or so, this comes out to a total monthly bill of Rs44 lakh, or about Rs17/GB.

That’s a hell of a lot of coin, considering that 2 months of that could pay for a year’s supply of bandwidth to Singapore. Yes, a year (well, a single STM-1 @ 155mbit/s, anyway, but the cost still only works out to about Rs13/GB).

As you can imagine, if I, as an ISP, can save Rs4 PER GIGABYTE, I’m damn well going to,

otherwise I have to pass that on to you – the consumer.

3) The proposed opening up of the last mile access by wireless is a useless idea. Wireless or any of it’s iterations cannot, I repeat cannot be relied on for data intensive applications. There is no draft proposal for public access of Wifi’s bankrolled by the municipal corporations. Wifi’s can be used for another lofty purpose. To route the mobile network calls in hard to reach areas. Another brilliant stroke would be to encourage the uptake of the VoIP.

4) Even if you have 100 Mbps rolling in a shiny FTTH all the way up to your home, the lack of “real application” is a dampener. What would the mass of humanity rolling in this country use 100 Mbps for? Facebook? There is no concept proposal for encouraging the uptake of the broadband applications, for fostering a community of developers, lack of clear focus on the e-commerce, overt valuations of the existing firms and the works.  Granted that this is chicken and egg situation,  100 Mbps broadband networks are mere pipe dreams till the time there is focus on backing up a reliable infrastructure and true “unlimited access”.

5) Unbundling of the last mile access: The PSU’s are like wives. You can’t live with them. You can’t kill them. Simple. However, it does not mean that the last mile should be unbundled without having a proper oversight of the sector. I had believed earlier that proper competition on the same copper would effectively bring down the prices. However, this is fraught with it’s own hassles. The copper is pubic property and I am sure that anyone investing money would extract his own pound of flesh in terms of ownership of the cable. (This one is a retort to Medianama).

This should not be encouraged. Instead, the companies need to be given incentives to invest in the cable, peer through a separate exchange, a unified license to allow them VoIP applications, create infrastructure for niche products. For example, there could be an ISP specifically for gaming. Let it have the best response times in terms of ping. A separate company for IPTV applications. A different company for say, tele-medicine solutions with end to end infrastructure. Back it up with rural broadband initiatives and then you have customized solutions for different segments.

Let these marginal players slug it out with the established partners. Let them expand the pie. Mobile telephony did not happen overnight but by relentless onslaught of the advertisements to create a need for the product. I am not a big fan of the mobile applications, but that does not bias my outlook for the explosive growth, even though the numbers are disputed crap.

Broadband is a niche application. The draft proposals are mere eye wash and they need to be understood in their context before we bleat and crow about being a fucked up IT “superpower”.

What I agree with Medianama is the crap “fair usage policies”. But I have already stressed on the “unlimited” access. This is hardly going to be achieved and despite claims by fucktards of downloading 100, 500 or even 1000 GB is hogwash. As far as the net neutrality goes, the “faster access” to certain businesses is a huge controversial issue. The ping times in this country are so awful that is hardly going to matter.

Hence, all the more the sarkari buffons need to be given a pat on their asses for making some effort to think over the issues. With all due respect, I am also uploading the critique to their proposals. I am not sure who is going to read them, but for sure, this is better than just sucking up and doing nothing.

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It’s easy to see the bias of the author about the “impoverished” Indians but there is too much optimism about targeting the benefits. The fact that the Aadhar scheme doesn’t really address the basic issue of data privacy, it is too much of a gamble.

Nandan also mentions about setting up a massive server farm for the data requests. The lack of Broadband at the peripheral level has hampered the data collection (that was a no brainer); which means that the basics have not been sorted out. The article also mentions about the queries to the database and problems cropping up later to be fixed. If I am not mistaken, this is as dumb assholism as it can get. Reason? All potential issues need to ironed out before data collection on a massive scale is carried out.

In my opinion, having a fault tolerant broadband over fixed line is imperative. The growth of the mobile telephony and hence the crappy 3G implementation is not in the public interest. Given the price structure of the data plans, there is no way that a reliable network geared for the public good is utilized for it’s need.

At the same time, public service networks like BSNL/MTNL need to be flogged for dragging their feet for missing the rural broadband plans. Wimax/LTE etc are good enough in theory but there is a theoretical limit to the extent of the data that can go through wireless.

Aadhar scheme is a hair brained exercise; much like the emperors clothes. Useless in execution with purported benefits not spelled out and absolutely no word on the data privacy.

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how would it be disruptive for the traditional cellular carriers.

A lot has been written skype’s acquistion (please see the related links below). Some people feel that it’s going to be good for the enterprise market, some feel that it is a useless deal with Microsoft bleeding millions of dollars everyday and a questionable “internet policy”. Perhaps all these rationales look at the whole question piecemeal. But no one has the complete answer.

I have been interested in the VoIP market for long. I have written about it earlier extensively (here, here, here) in the past. Yet, Skype’s acquisition takes the cake.

Image via Wikipedia

In an earlier post, I mentioned:

Image via CrunchBase

TRAI 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….. If Internet telephony is implemented in it’s present shape, it would

see present rates crashing down to a large extent.

Image via Wikipedia

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.

In another blog post, I had written:

Govind says that Wifi can be used to carry calls which works out to be cheaper. Of course, I have explored these options way back earlier on; the current “competitive” scenario has resulted only in oligopolies and each new talk plan is basically a rehash of the others. Without disclosing upfront about the estimated monthly outgo, TRAI okays each plan without taking the consumer’s advantage in question. As a result we are fleeced to no extent. I really doubt whether WiFi can be used to carry out the calls-the investments are way too huge to justify parallel (and cheaper ) networks. Where would Bharti get it’s crores from?

Assuming that wifi becomes available all around, what is the guarantee that telcos won’t use all means to block the calls via Skype or any other internet phone? High usage charges would spike any consumer interest because in all probability it would be a “value added service” which by it’s own argument, can be priced higher. Unless of course, people set up their own small WiFi networks. A long shot indeed.

And in the winning entry for “Big Ideas Contest”, Skype (or Internet Telephony) was mentioned in passing; actually leveraging the low cost of routing international calls and passing on the advantage to the customers.

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).

I don’t have any love lost for Microsoft; but as any corporation, it does what it has to do to survive. It’s a jungle out there and only the best survive by breaking through the clutter. There can be no easy answers to certain “defining moments”; we must wait for the answers to reveal themselves. The point here is that I have remained consistent in my assertions over the years and have called for opening up the standards instead.

Let’s look at what New York Times article has to say.

Image via Wikipedia

The telecommunications industry is already in a state of flux as more people disconnect their home telephone lines in favor of cellphones. Now the wireless carriers are looking for new ways to make money based on mobile broadband and applications, rather than voice minutes. “Eventually, everything migrates to a data channel,” said Brian Higgins, an executive at Verizon Wireless who is developing products and services for the company’s high-speed 4G network. “We’re moving away from silos of communication to one where everything is combined together.”

This assertion is not valid but rather a corporate spin and gibberish. The reason is that landlines offer higher rate of data transfer and wireless networks can easily get choked. Similarly for 3G networks being pandered about in India; main reason is to offer better voice minutes than spur on the data usage. Had there been any commitment for the same, the market would have reacted in a “bloodbath” to drop the rates and make it better to access the services.

Howsoever clueless these people are, data is definitely not on their minds. Hence, the question of “communication silos” does not arise at all.

But the Skype deal also signifies a larger interest in next-generation communications services. It is not just Skype that the wireless companies need to worry about. A bevy of mobile messaging applications, including WhatsApp, Kik, GroupMe and textPlus, allow people to send messages over data networks, sidestepping the cost of sending and receiving standard text messages.

Carriers already must deal with many new competitors in the communications game. Name companies like Apple, Facebook and Google are making services available that traditionally only carriers could offer. Google, like Skype, offers ways to make free phone and video calls over the Internet. Apple lets iPhone owners make video calls.

The ultimate risk for the carriers, analysts say, is becoming “dumb pipes,” providing only the data connection and not selling any more sophisticated communications services themselves.

Agreed on this count. The newer generation services mentioned here are really disruptive. However, they have not achieved a critical scale; not to the level that carriers start blocking them actively violating “net-neutrality”.

So how would the companies react to such developments? Possibly by lowering expectations of supra-massive profits at our expense and by “signing up deals”. Although Value Added Services (VAS) remains a viable channel, I still have to see any “developments” in that; it remains a subject of a future post.

Carriers have responded to the shift toward digital communication differently. Some seek to leverage the new wave of services to differentiate themselves and gain an edge over competitors. Sprint, for example, recently united with Google to let its customers link their Sprint phone numbers to Google Voice, a service that rings all of a person’s phones and even Gmail when someone calls that person’s number.

However, these efforts are half hearted approaches to the present dispensation. Skype is important, yes, in the VOIP Space. With the development of GNU Public Telephony project on fast track, I am sure something would definitely strike in for alternative access opportunities like SIP phones coming in the mainstream.

I remain positive for a Vonage like service over landlines and I strongly back that company (please, it’s not an endorsement). For a fixed amount, it’s possible to call in major countries and is totally “place agnostic”. I can make unlimited international calls all across for a fixed monthly fees. Thats the real power of broadband for communication. Wireless is not cool because of it’s inherent limitations and POTS (Plain Old Telephone System) is STILL the best bet.

Image via Wikipedia

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However, EFF disagrees with the basic assumption of “closed wifi” networks asking instead for different protocols. Howsoever, reasonable their demands might sound, I think it’s stupidity to let someone else piggy ride on my network; specially in the prevailing scenario.

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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!

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Kudos to the early adopters who got seduced by 3G. It was hailed as the coming of the jesus; as the next re-incarnation and watching “TV” on the go. There are some stupid people and then there are even more stupid people. The profound cretins can’t even distiguish chalk from cheese.

Interestingly, Business Standard has shown “rare courage” in Indian media to get on with negative coverage of the 3G experience. One of the commonest complaints is the quality of the service.

A fluctuating 3G network is a common complaint from consumers who are early adopters of the service. Users say their new 3G network keeps shifting back to 2G network, mostly in the middle when they are downloading or uploading a video. For the time period that networks shift from 3G to 2G, customers are unable to make calls as well.

Another “frustrated” customer points back to fluctuating network:

And 3G service is not living up to its most luring promise — entertainment while on the go. On the contrary, customers in Mumbai says the 3G network doesn’t work while travelling in the trains. “The advertisements say that 3G users need not miss matches and watch TV on mobile. But once we get on to the train, there are no traces of network, neither 2G nor 3G,” says yet another frustrated subscriber.

I have always advocated community Wifi for the purpose. Invest money from the municipalties. That way, the community owns the network, instead of being dictated by a couple of dickheads. However, as the nature of this banana republic is, we underestimate the indirect costs of having such pathetic companies at helm of the affairs. Wireless data is a pipe dream; a useless idea which should be abhorred.It cannot be undone but well lets see how this unfolds.

A company that cannot ensure proper coverage should be out of the business. Simple. In India, it would not happen though.

P.S. The image above shows the Metro Wifi which ought to be blanketed.

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Which is better? iPad 2 or Kindle?

It’s hard to decide on the specifications and my only interest to put up the post here is to mark a shift in the way Internet is being accessed in other countries. US remains a competitive market; partly because the mechanisms of delivery exist there. In India, people expect it for “free”. This is also one reason why I strongly oppose the “limited broadband” because that would affect the way users interact with the medium. However, rest assured that market is not mature enough for the numbers; there is no strong “demand” to question the pathetic supplies as yet and voice calls dominate the Indian market overwhelmingly.

Register has an interesting write up on upcoming Kindle. I remain deeply opposed to concept of “Ecosystem” which tends to track the users over a period of time to target advertising. There are credible alternatives in Open Source and in recent times, there is a huge surge of developer interest in polishing the user interface. ( FYI, everything on my system is Open Source alone barring a few proprietary codecs and Flash- I am still waiting for HTML 5 to mature so that I ditch it for good).

Kindle and iPad are ugly vestiges of ecosystem (as I mentioned above) which hardly merit attention. I think it was Amazon that has pioneered the use of a recommendation engine to it’s visitors. Apple tracks its payments through it’s iTunes interface keeping a lion’s share of the revenues. The content creators have nothing else but to gnash their teeth because iPad owners (and I would say a huge bunch of idiots and suckers) are most likely to loosen their purse strings for paying up the cash.

Hence it becomes imperative to check out what the linked article has to say.

It is not clear why Apple has delayed enforcing the rule – clearly designed to protect its own revenues, but also its position as the primary point of contact for the user’s mobile activity – until 30 June, since it already barred the Sony Reader app from its App Store last month on the basis of the same terms and conditions….Currently, its Kindle for iOS ereader app handles all ebook sales through Amazon’s own Kindle web store, with the revenue divided only between Amazon and the publishers. The more successful Apple’s tablets and apps are, the more difficult it will be for Amazon to walk away from its iOS platform – but it could whip up a dangerous level of consumer, developer and even regulatory opposition to the iPhone maker (though, as the proud owner of a closed ecosystem itself, it would need to tread carefully).

How do they monetise their platforms:

Amazon is rumoured to be planning a scheme where it will give away free Kindle ereaders, for instance, to customers who commit to certain levels of ebook purchasing, newspaper subscriptions or the Amazon Prime service. And of course, Amazon has an established retail platform and experience that commands high levels of awareness and trust, unlike the other tablet makers. It could enhance this with its own tablet because it could take its own 30 per cent cut of in-app purchases.

How is this going to affect the netbook sales:

For every 10 tablets sold, five netbook or notebook sales will be lost in developed markets, it estimates, limiting notebook growth to 8 per cent year-on-year in 2011, and pushing netbooks into a decline of 13 per cent, to 34 million units. Many areas – especially the US, western Europe, China and Indonesia – will suffer from overstocked retail channels for mobile PCs, although the iPad’s impact on emerging markets will remain minimal.

This is going to be a hard pill to swallow though I am sure that the manufacturers have built in supply chain efficiencies and they could foresee such an event. If I had piles of cash, I would enable Linux on all the netbooks and sell them at subsidised prices or give them away for free with a bundled service. Though this unlikely to happen but if anyone from the telecom industry is reading this, this is your last chance to popularize the 3G offering. Get into hardware sales, bundle it with 3G, work out the costs of supplying it to remote areas and you have assured locked in customers for say, 3 years. The specifics could be worked out but a mobile netbook with open source applications is a great “killer option”. If you choose to support Microsoft Tax (like you as assholes are capable of), this would be unviable in the long run and MS wants Windows 7 or whatever number of their crappy operating system you can imagine to run on the “tablets”. I mean who wants to deal with such demented idiots anyway?

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Bureaucracy is restrictive. They are sozzled idiots who have no clue as to which way the wind is blowing. No doubt, TRAI is saddled with such idiots brimming up to the core.

I came across a brilliant write up by Keith Hudson (here) and he writes nailing the issue to the core:

And then there’s the educational potential of the Internet. When I wrote my book, Introduction to Computer-Assisted Learning (Chapman and Hall, 1984) — that is, before the Internet was invented — I envisaged that, by now, we would have vast educational programmes in all possible subjects beamed down from satellites. How naive I was! They still haven’t arrived. The formal university procedures and bureaucracy-controlled school systems still hold sway and cramp many more potential geniuses than they encourage. The poor bright boy or girl in a far-off Chinese or Indian village—or, so help us, increasingly in poor homes in the US or the UK—still hasn’t got access to effective teaching programmes that could be available on the Net. When this happens—one day!—then that will be yet another spanner in over-large bueaucratic empires.

Hence when I come across fancy experiments with OPLC projects, it isn’t the sole medium of instruction that helps. In any case, there is NO probable research or it’s outcome favoring the technology over the traditional methods. Technology can play it’s part as a supplement (e.g. Broadband) but not as a stand alone mechanism. A video conferencing in a remote village would actually help the children to explore the boundaries beyond their own physical limitations and confines but only if they have been primed to expect what is going to be shown to them. Here in lies the challange.

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So, talks have included discussion of Deutsche Telekom owning about 50 percent of a combined T-Mobile USA-Sprint, or T-Mobile continuing on their own using spectrum acquired from Clearwire to fuel further network upgrades. It’s not clear where any of this leaves Clearwire, though you can expect all of this to be sorted out within the next three to six months, and we may have some juicy Clearwire inside information shortly.
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The VL600 is $100 after a new 2 year contract and online $50 rebate.
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Image via Wikipedia

Everyone is pissed.

And so does Tech Dirt claims that it would take over 10,000 years to change the ‘upto’ marketing hoopla in Broadband access.

The point here is that at least the regulators are talking about it. Here, TRAI is BLISSFULLY unaware of the issues! I wonder what the”consumer organizations” have to say about this.

Read More here.

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Given that SMS is pure profit and costs virtually nothing to provide (given such signals travel over tower control channels anyway), this is inevitable, though it’s impressive carriers have managed to fight off the change for this long. Granted what you’ll save in SMS costs as open platforms kill off the concept of voice minutes and SMS, you’ll wind up paying in data prices, as carriers re-align (read: raise) mobile data pricing to counter the lost revenues.
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Broadcasters still aren’t entirely thrilled by incentive auctions, given they fear the government’s version of “voluntary” could be a little less than voluntary. Of course if lawmakers really didn’t want special interests driving spectrum policy, they could pass “use it or lose it” spectrum rules that would limit squatting. They could also finally pass a law calling for an inventory of available spectrum, something that most everybody supports yet for some reason continues to fail in legislative form every time it’s introduced.
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