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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• Overdrive Pro Offers 3G/4G Mobile Broadband For Sprint (informationweek.com)
• Google Nexus S Goes 4G on Sprint (pcworld.com)
• If You Have Smartphone You Don’t Need 3G Tablets (mwd.com)
• How I Left AT&T for Something Better and Saved Money Doing it (lockergnome.com)
• AT&T will use T-Mobile AWS for LTE, current towers for 3G (intomobile.com)

Tags: 3G, Advertisement, Broadband, Business Standard, DTH, Google, GUI, India, Media, Mobile, Telecommunications India, TRAI, Wifi, Wireless

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?

Related articles

• Why Android Could Help Amazon and the Kindle Threaten the iPad (ostatic.com)
• Amazon is best hope of a viable alternative to iPad (go.theregister.com)
• Kindle ecosystem – the very best Kindle sites, tools, blogs (ireaderreview.com)
• Can any tablet challenge the iPad? (reviews.cnet.com)
• Can any tablet challenge the iPad? (reviews.cnet.com)
• iOS 4.3 Getting Started Guide, Which iPad 2 to Buy?, iPad 2 Teardown, Android Tablets to Fail, and More, iNews Review (lowendmac.com)
• The Kindle Is An iPad Accessory, And That’s Why It’s Still Going To Be Huge (AMZN, AAPL) (businessinsider.com)
• How can open source survive in a post-PC World? (h-online.com)
• Android makes tablet gains, but iPad to stay strong in 2011, say studies (linuxfordevices.com)
• Amazon hires more Android developers: color Kindle Android tablet in the offing? (teleread.com)
• iPad 2 will keep Apple top of the tablet market, says Gartner (guardian.co.uk)
• Apple iPad 2: Who should buy and who should pass (zdnet.com)

Tags: 3G, Advertising, Amazon, android, Android Tablets, App Store, Assholes, Broadband, China, Computing, DTH, Google, GUI, HTML, Idiots, India, Indonesia, Internet, iPhone, Kindle, Kindle Android, Linux, Microsoft, Mobile, Open Source, open source applications, Opera, operating system, overstocked retail channels, PC World, Publishing, retail platform, SMS, Sony, Telecommunications India, United States, web store, Wifi, Windows, Windows 7, Wireless

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.

 

Related articles

• Caps Coming to Broadband Data Usage. Where Does That Leave Netflix? (community.tradeking.com)
• AT&T adds monthly data caps on home broadband (blogs.consumerreports.org)
• Will BT’s new broadband boss bring fibre to rural Britain? (telegraph.co.uk)
• Does Broadband Create Digital Ghettos? (techcrunch.com)
• Don’t Rural Areas Deserve Access to Improved Internet Service? (liveruralnl.com)
• Constant Contact Supports the National Broadband Plan (blogs.constantcontact.com)
• Shocker! UK regulator finds average broadband speeds are ‘less than half’ those advertised (engadget.com)

Tags: Broadband, bureaucracy-controlled school systems, Chinese, DTH, Google, Idiots, India, Internet, Media, OPLC, techcrunch.com, Telecommunications India, TRAI, United Kingdom, United States, video conferencing, Wireless