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| Monday, June 30, 2008 |
| Sistema Plans Rollout - Existing players safe for now |
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 Russian Telecom giant, Sistema which has controlling stake in Shyam Telecom of India with Unified Access License in 22 circles has set an ambitious target of 35 mn subscribers by 2010.
Sistema's rollout coincides with other launches - Datacom, Idea Cellular Maxis, RCOM - GSM) and comes at a latter stage of penetration, requiring higher upfront coverage. Sistema will invest US$2.5bn over three years (US$1.0bn in CY08) to achieve 70% coverage of "state capitals, highways and railroads," which Bharti had on end-FY08.
Government's decision to auction 3G license before it is out of power and allowing the entry of MVNOs will dent severely into the bottomline of new telecom licensees. |
Published on Monday, June 30, 2008 at 12:28 PM  |
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| Sunday, June 15, 2008 |
| Platform + Regulations - m-Commerce set for Big Boom |
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For a business such as m-Commerce to kick off, Technology platform and Regulations are the two most important requirements. mCheck and Paymate developed mobile payment platforms in India while the RBI removed the last hurdle by waving the Green Flag on Mobile Payments upto Rs 1,500 to kickoff.
RBI has mandated that SMS be used for small ticket transactions [Rs 1,500 max] thus enabling customers with even the most basic phone to participate in Mobile Banking. RBI has also asked all the banks operating in India to make their mobile banking facility available to all phone networks licensed by the DoT.
Mr. Sanjay Swamy of mChek said,
It is a very positive step from the regulators, which shows their support for the initiative. They have claerly spelt out roles of each of the players with enough scope for flexibility. Don't be surprised, if you see customers paying their Dinner checks or Grocery bills by using their mobile. |
| Published on Sunday, June 15, 2008 at 1:25 PM |
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| Thursday, June 12, 2008 |
| How to book iPhone with Airtel ? |
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 Bharti Airtel along with Apple will launch 3G iPhone at half the cost of what Nokia launched its N78 phone. You should be a Bharti Airtel Post Paid or Pre Paid subscriber and send an SMS iphone to 54321 [Toll Free]. The response you will get is,
Thank you for your interest in the most innovative phone brought yo you by Airtel. This device combines three products in one - a revolutionary phone, a wide screen iPod and a breakthrough internet device with e-mail and desktop class web browser. For more details reply to this sms with iphone space space . We will shortly send you an e-mail with complete details.
I replied as instructed and the next message was,
.....We shall get in touch with you more details. I am still waiting for their call. Being a premium customer [customers with monthly bill of atleast Rs 2,000] I hope I will have some priority over the others looking at the tremendous response they have already got just by the announcement. |
| Published on Thursday, June 12, 2008 at 7:13 PM |
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| Tuesday, June 10, 2008 |
| Organized retailers catch up and have ambitious expansion plans |
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 As Indian Retail sector tries to organize itself in verticals such as Apparels to Home Adorment, Mobile handset retailers are competing on thin margins with high volumes as well. Branded mobile stores now account for 15% of the handsets sold in India with the figure expected to touch 40% by 2010.
These stores are leaving no stone unturned to mature into the market of e-Zone or Reliance Digital. Hotspot, MobileNxt, Mobile Store etc which started as Mobile and Accessories retailers are now planning to stock laptops, iPods, Xbox etc.
Sanjeev Mahajan, CEO of HotSpot Mobile Retailer said,
Currently we are operating 350 stores all over India and will expand this to around 1,500 by the end of the year. Through our stores we want to provide our customers a complete package wherein they can shop for the latest technology in mobile handets as well as in laptop, cameras, iPods, and mobile movie viewing. We want to move from mobile retailing to technology retailing.
The story is the same at MobileNXT as its CEO, Vijay Menon echoed,
Since the margins from mobile handsets alone is not much, we are also offering products like iPod MP3 players and speakers also to our customers. We plan to introduce gadgets like camera and laptops sometime in the future.
MobileNXT took over a year to realize the potential of e-commerce as their website went live just last month. Univercell is the pioneer in Mobile Online Retailing after eBay India. At last we are moving towards the regime of Customer is the King :-) |
| Published on Tuesday, June 10, 2008 at 1:06 AM |
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| Thursday, June 05, 2008 |
| Nokia N78 - Not even Worth a Look. |
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 Nokia which is having half of its sales from emerging markets like India and China has launched a series on phones in the popular N Series in these markets. However, after the initial euphoria, Nokia hasn't lived up to people's expectations [which only went higher after they saw the coolest ever mobile phone - iPhone]
Review of the Nokia N78 Mobile Phone:
This is targeted at the youth as a convergence device. Yes it has capability for Wi-Fi and GPRS [Don't rely on GPRS. We tested with Airtel and Vodafone and both simply suck really badly in GPRS services.]
It is worth a laugh when Mr. Taneja of Nokia India said with this phone users can log on to Web 2.0 destinations like Facebook, but How ?
N78 is the slimmest of the N-Series devices. This phone is pre-loaded with Maps of 8 Indian cities and Points of Interests [ATMs, Banks, Restaurants, Hospitals etc] The screen is bit smaller than N73 [far smaller compared to iPhone] which simply makes it unfit for someone to use the Maps.
The only interesting feature we found on Nokia N78 was the "location tagger" which automatically tags location data to the picture, allowing users to save picture by date and by geographical co-ordinates.
Nokia N78 supports add on memory up to 8GB. Internal speakers sound quality is barely acceptable and has support for standard 3.5mm headphones. N78 didn't sync completely with the PC Suite software provided and don't ask about the hanging problem.
Before iPhone we thought Nokia phones are really cool and value for money, however, what is obvious now is Nokia lacks R&D and has been selling just a mash up of applications with different name and higher memory. Nokia N78 is priced at a whopping Rs 19,990 in Indian market while iPhone is expected to launch in the range of Rs 20,000 to Rs 22,000 making it a much better BUY than N78.
Nokia phones in Europe come with 24 months warranty while in India its just 12 months, we hate this discrimination by Nokia. |
| Published on Thursday, June 05, 2008 at 5:49 PM |
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| Saturday, May 31, 2008 |
| 8.2 Mn Subscribers Added in April |
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 India added 8.22 mln mobile users in April, after overtaking US to become the world's second largest wireless market in India. Start-up spectrum in some various circles was also allocated to new Telecom operators who are starting to operations to sell-out after a while [Unitech and Videocon] Here is the break-up of market share of various cellular service providers [End of April-2008] in India and their ARPU / Month in INR,
- Aircel 10.99 mln NA
- Bharti Airtel 64.37 mln Rs 357
- BPL 1.31 mln Rs 350-375
- BSNL 36.68 mln Rs 244 [ARPU seems to be very low, not sure why, I'll get to the bottom of this]
- Idea Cellular 25.04 mln Rs 283
- MTNL 3.24 mln Rs 196
- Reliance Comm [GSM+ CDMA] 47.45 mln Rs 317
- Tata Indicom Teleservices 24.77 mln NA
- Spice Telecom 4.36 mln Rs 314
- Vodafone Essar 45.78 mln NA
The Telecom Minister recently said issues regarding 3G licenses will be sorted out and issued soon so that service providers can start service by Jan-09. This is the price we pay to live in democracy like India where Minister's have the ultimate authority discouraging engineers and scientists views. |
| Published on Saturday, May 31, 2008 at 9:26 PM |
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| Wednesday, May 21, 2008 |
| 10 Most Popular WAP Sites - Google Leads |
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 According to a study by Opera browser, here are the top 10 websites accessed by Indians using GPRS / WAP.
- Orkut [ Orkut Mobile - Social Networking Site but the mobile version has limited features but works cool]
- Google [Search Engine]
- Yahoo! Mobile [We tried Yahoo! Go Mobile Application and it didn't work]
- Peperonity [Mobile Community]
- Mobile9.com [Gallery]
- Mocospace [ Social Networking]
- 160by2.com [Free SMS backed by Advertising]
- Mobango - [ Mobile media sharing]
- Itsmy - [Free Mobile Content Sharing]
- IndianRailways [Railway Ticketing]
With Opera being the default browser on most GPRS enabled handsets, we have no other choice bu to rely on this statistics. |
| Published on Wednesday, May 21, 2008 at 12:28 PM |
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| Sunday, May 11, 2008 |
| Declining Revenues in Wireless |
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The Average Revenue Per User has been consistently declining in both the CDMA and GSM Wireless segments in the World's second largest and cheapest cellular market.
Reliance Communications saw a decline in ARPU [Average Revenue Per User] from 375.0 to mere Rs 317 at the end of Fy2008[ March-8]. QoQ figures - 375.0 361.0 339.0 317.0 However, the company has been able to maintain Average Revenue per Minute [ARPM] consistently around Rs 0.75 QoQ Figures - 0.74 0.74 0.76 0.74 We cannot directly take into consideration the Average Minutes of Usage per User because Reliance has many unlimited calling plans on its own network something not provided by other wireless service providers.
Bharti Airtel also witnessed similar decline in ARPU. QoQ figures Rs 390 366 358 357. Surprisingly, the ARPM is lower at Bharti Airtel. QoQ Figures - 0.82 0.78 0.76 0.70
Amongst the listed entities, Idea Cellular had the worst ARPU. QoQ Figures Rs320 288 279 287. Idea's ARPM is comparable to Bharti Airtel - QoQ Figures - 0.84 0.80 0.74 0.70
With the entry of couple of more service providers, existing operators have vowed to decrease prices further to compete intensely, but looking at it in other way, it is to wipe out these brave souls. |
| Published on Sunday, May 11, 2008 at 12:30 AM |
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