These are the changing times. For sure.
This quarter has seen some record profits being posted by the telecom companies. How much of it is financial jugglery? I wouldn’t know. It is hard to believe the absoulte (or estimated numbers) of 115 million mobile subscribers and I would keep my negativism intact.
Reliance is revamping it’s operations. Arguably the days of megabit speeds would possibly take eternity and it’s broadband remains moribund. 150kbps unlimited? How can they market it as ‘broadband’? In the mobile space, Reliance is advertising a slew of handsets- aspirational stuff for the common masses indeed. The low prices are mostly for the Chinese handsets and my guess for it’s longetivity is as good as yours. The handset majors seem to avoid CDMA like poison and the real action is still in the GSM space.
Spice Punjab has seen major acquisition by Telekom Malaysia and they would be majorly using this inflow of money to upgrade their congested networks. According to a source, it would take roughly 3 months to start the due process. Meanwhile, Spice is planning to acquire licences for other circles. No doubt it would take time and efforts to update the whole due process. I shall keep you posted about this company. Primarily for a simple reason. It had perhaps one of the highest ARPU’s earlier on because it was the sole service provider in Punjab market. Things went on a downhill slide when Airtel, backed by Bharti, went on a major offensive against Spice. Spice has augmented it’s revenues by bundling the services with it’s own manufactured handsets.
MTNL has introduced IPTV and is charging 300 per month for free to air television shows. I haven’t seen IPTV ever in real time so it would difficult to pass any judgement on the same. BSNL has introduced gaming services and it seems to be nominal. The best part is that the gaming services donot get counted in the final bill or the data downloads so it should appeal to majorly. Unless of course, they put in the crappiest servers with a huge lag time. So by the time you poit and shoot your enemy, you are already dead!
BSNL was to announce a mega tender for it’s GSM lines which got nixed in the Delhi high court. I believe it was Motorola which was the aggrieved party. Strange. Had it been for Airtel (which announced the deal with Nokia), there are usually no court hearings. I am sure there is something wrong somewhere.
One India has been rejigged and relaunched with full page advertisements crowing about the “achievements” of the present government. It isnt worth the price of a toilet paper even with the foreign bitch’s face on it.
Reliance is offering Mobile blogging platform. You could see a lot of idiots trying to post in from their mobiles. Sure they would and then crow about it.
DTH is still not seeing the volumes to break even. However, the cable operators are running around scared kittens. They have reduced the monthly rentals (by underdeclaring the subscriber base) and surprisingly, the complaints are attended to. I am planning to go in for a DTH; though I am waiting for the market to throw up a clear differentiator from the existing players. Lets see how things work out.
Reliance is planning to launch the GSM services (apart from the North Eastern States it operated in). It may sound illogical thing to do but I am willing to go in by the GSM lobby that it works out to be cheaper as compared to CDMA. Even though CDMA as a technology is better than GSM. Does it mean that consumers would get more choice? I doubt. Though I do know that Anil Ambani has a lot of cash to burn up.
Bangalore is getting wireless internet connectivity in select areas. Mind you, it can’t solve it’s civic problems as yet.
On the personal front too, I am firmly entrenched in Radiation Oncology. I wish I could blog about it full time including the case discussions et al. However, the present state of affairs leaves me little time for anything else.
I do hope that I am able to update this blog on a regular basis. Though as usual, it is the RSS feeds that make sense. Thanks for sticking by and seeing through. I really hope that things change for the better.