[pratyush6]

Originally Posted by msdivy

Few points, spectrum was sold by auction. So every telecom paid the right price.

Yes, and shouldn't they have thought about how much to bid in that auction and how are they going to recoup their investments? Why crib and cry now and go to daddy asking for help? Are the customers responsible for their bad decisions?

Originally Posted by msdivy

The average annual revenue .... They are not dumb.

No they are not, but they do think the average customer is.

ISPs do not have the right to control what anyone does with their internet connection. They can give it whatever spin they want but in the end it all comes down to greed and money.

[Chetan_Rao]

Originally Posted by msdivy

Few points, spectrum was sold by auction. So every telecom paid the right price. Nothing obscene about the price. This has to be paid over 20 years. The average annual revenue for top 3 Indian telecom companies is around $5 billion or close to Rs 35,000 crores. They are not dumb.

Common sense 101 would suggest one shouldn't bid what one can't pay, immediately or long term. The govt. auctioned spectrum and set prices, but nobody was forced to participate, bid or purchase anything.

Telcos bid whatever they thought they could afford (apparently not), and then decided the way to go about recouping it was to try and capture more market with predatory pricing for a few years then consolidate once they've the lion's share, which hasn't worked out as intended. The market has matured over the same period, with traffic increasingly moving away from traditional voice/text services to data, and the telcos got caught out because cheap data was the carrot they've been using to entice the lucrative urban/semi-urban customers in the first place.

Either way you look at it, the customer can't be blamed for telcos' poor financial decisions and strategy. They need to rethink how they do business that aligns with market dynamics, or the market will sort them out eventually anyway. Their whole aversion to net neutrality seems an embodiment of 'penny wise, pound foolish' to me. Just my opinion.

[msdivy]

Originally Posted by Chetan_Rao

Telcos bid whatever they thought they could afford (apparently not), and then decided the way to go about recouping it was to try and capture more market with predatory pricing for a few years then consolidate once they've the lion's share, which hasn't worked out as intended.

Telcos charging for WhatsApp just because they bid for spectrum is lame excuse. Probably reasoning of junior staff in the telecom trying to justify his company's action. BTW, they bid for 4G spectrum but WhatsApp works fine with 3G
Telcos are very much profitable and there is no reason to believe they made wrong choice bidding for spectrum. Proof, nobody is quitting the industry but newer ones are entering. Things are working better than they intended. They are a commercial entity and they want growth quarter after quarter. OTT is one such opportunity to pile on their profits.

[civic-sense]

Spectrum is not a commodity. It takes nothing to manufacture and it doesn't have any value or generate any value unless somebody is using it. Spectrum is just a mechanism by which it is ensured that no two operators use the same frequency to transmit their signals. ...so that one gus data does not interfer with another ones.

Ideally, the government should not charge a fee for spectrum, but so as to ensure that it is managed wisely, they are selling a licence - licence to use a particular frequency. And then since spectrum is "practically" not unlimited, the government has to devise a mechanism to allot it to various operators who seek to use those frequencies.

1) Govt could divide it equally to all players - in which case some are bound to under-utilize what they have got, while some others would be starved.

OR

2) They could allot it only to the "best" operators - Aristotle anyone? The best violin in the world deserves to be played by the best player not the richest one?

OR

3) They could auction it - sell to the richest of operators and earn some money while doing it.

The mechanism that the govt has used is the third one, which has been lauded by one and all, but forget that they are being made to pay for every penny spent by these operators to buy spectrum. Why do you think that the 3G rates are high? They are passing every penny to you.

So, if you thought that we made these guys "pay" for the spectrum, think again - YOU paid for it. Or rather, paying for it.

Government -

[Samurai]

Well, cat is out of the bag. Here is what Flipkart was hoping to achieve via tie-up with Airtel.... How else could they make Amazon.in slower than Flipkart?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCux6OsDq6Q

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ZZUf6Tr4PQ

[poloman]

An interesting article on OTT services.
http://www.express.co.uk/life-style/...Viber-Hangouts

But a shocking test by AndroidPit has revealed that WhatsApp uses 1.3Mb of data per MINUTE when making a phone call.

This is not a problem if you are connected to an unlimited WiFi hotspot – but WhatsApp could quickly romp though a restricted 3G or 4G data plan.

Chatting away at a rate of 1.3Mb of data per minute will burn through a 500MB monthly data plan in just SIX hours – which is equal to 11 minute of call-time per day

[civic-sense]

Airtel in trouble for injecting javascript code into web pages. Instead of fixing it they threaten a lawsuit on the guy how unearthed it.

Its high time Airtel is made to pay for its unethical practices. But then, given that they are very close to you-know-who, they would get out of this too unscathed.

http://tech.firstpost.com/news-analy...ce-270111.html

[mayankk]

MTNL also does this on their broadband connections.
There's a constant display ad running at the bottom right of any browser I use.

But being MTNL, there's a couple of problems added on, for me, as well as them.
One: The ad is for an offer for a plan, and the last date is, was, in December 2014.
Two: The connection hangs waiting for the server running the ad to respond, and nothing loads in that time, which could range from 10 seconds to timeout.

Adblock extension did take care of it, though

[needmorebhp]

Well, there you go. DoT just told net neutrality and it's advocates to bugger off

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/t...w/48096480.cms

What this means? Bye bye Skype, Viber, WhatsApp. This opens doors for tariff/revenue categorisation of other services as well. Want to play youtube videos? No you can't because that leads to loss of revenue for broadcasting industry, which my company owns so pay extra for that.

[tsk1979]

Check this out.
WE are screwed
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1...eview?sle=true

[Chetan_Rao]

The problem isn't just what they're proposing to do today. The real problem is what they'll do AFTER this is allowed to happen.

This is the start of the slippery slope, not the bottom of the pit it leads into.

[tsk1979]

Originally Posted by Chetan_Rao

The problem isn't just what they're proposing to do today. The real problem is what they'll do AFTER this is allowed to happen.

This is the start of the slippery slope, not the bottom of the pit it leads into.

And you cannot do anything about it. What to switch operators? Airtel goons will come and bribe your RWA to not allow any other operator.

Already in bangalore, within the same apartment complex buildings are divided, and if you live in a certain building, you cannot get the other operator. These are cartels backed by the government, with only one purpose. Swindle and rob.

[RSR]

This was only to be expected, after all the initial noise and protests had settled down.

When have governments in India ever listened to the voice of common people on issues of public interest? They've always had their ears glued to the mouths of cabals, cartels and mafias with vested interests!

The vicious PSU oil marketing cabal is already blindly looting petrol users, even after both petrol & diesel prices were de-regulated. The amount of money looted per litre from petrol users only becomes bigger with every passing month!

If the PSU oil cabal can blindly loot petrol users as they please, can the private-cum-PSU telecom cabal be far behind?

Of course not. Each cabal, cartel and mafia wants to increase its loot constantly. India has become a country of cabals, cartels and mafias in every imaginable field.

[mallumowgli]

Debaters here on net neutrality may be interested in the following article

http://www.theguardian.com/books/201...pitalism-begun

Few snippets

information is corroding the market’s ability to form prices correctly. That is because markets are based on scarcity while information is abundant. The system’s defence mechanism is to form monopolies – the giant tech companies – on a scale not seen in the past 200 years, yet they cannot last. By building business models and share valuations based on the capture and privatisation of all socially produced information, such firms are constructing a fragile corporate edifice at odds with the most basic need of humanity, which is to use ideas freely.

If we restate Arrow’s principle in reverse, its revolutionary implications are obvious: if a free market economy plus intellectual property leads to the “underutilisation of information”, then an economy based on the full utilisation of information cannot tolerate the free market or absolute intellectual property rights. The business models of all our modern digital giants are designed to prevent the abundance of information.

True, states can shut down Facebook, Twitter, even the entire internet and mobile network in times of crisis, paralysing the economy in the process. And they can store and monitor every kilobyte of information we produce. But they cannot reimpose the hierarchical, propaganda-driven and ignorant society of 50 years ago, except – as in China, North Korea or Iran – by opting out of key parts of modern life. It would be, as sociologist Manuel Castells put it, like trying to de-electrify a country

Today, the thing that is corroding capitalism, barely rationalised by mainstream economics, is information. Most laws concerning information define the right of corporations to hoard it and the right of states to access it, irrespective of the human rights of citizens. The equivalent of the printing press and the scientific method is information technology and its spillover into all other technologies, from genetics to healthcare to agriculture to the movies, where it is quickly reducing costs.

The caveat is that The Guardian was always a relatively left-of-center Newspaper/Media and the article towards the end tends tobecome propogandistic

[Chetan_Rao]

^^^While the publication isn't an epitome of responsible journalism, the article does raise some genuine points mixed in with propagandist sensationalism.

I do agree with the central theme, the govt. and its capitalist cronies can try all sorts of stuff, but unless they're willing to turn us into a centrally-censored society (a la China and others), they can't really keep this nonsense up in the long term. I wouldn't say it's impossible though, because India isn't a democracy anymore, except for pretenses.