India: Reliance promotes rural mobile services


Posted on August 26, 2009  /  0 Comments

Reliance was at the presentations we made on teleuse@BOP3 results about awareness, trial and use of more-than-voice applications on mobiles. We can only speculate whether our results were used in the design of the services described by The Hindu:

RCom is launching three initiatives — BharatNet plan, Grameen VAS and M2M (Machine to Machine) solutions — under its rural drive. BharatNet plan is a high-speed wireless Internet service in over 20,000 rural locations across India and will address four million PC users in rural India. A high-speed variant of the Reliance NetConnect service specifically designed for rural and sub-urban markets, it will offer speeds of about 153 Kbps, which is 4 to 8 times the current dial-up speed of wire-line services. BharatNet is being offer at Rs. 98 a week with downloads up to 350 MB.

With this sachet pricing, RCom plans to create for all users across rural India.

Grameen VAS services cater to specific needs of rural mobile consumers in over five lakh villages tapping into the vast potential of the Rural VAS services. Priced at Rs. 15 a month, it will cover several specialised services including Mandi Bhav, agriculture and animal husbandry updates, weather forecast and samachar in 10 Indian languages. The services can be accessed via different modes, that is, voice portals, SMS, USSD and Data .

Machine to Machine applications are mobile applications that aid automation, surveillance, remote monitoring, and data gathering. The M2M opportunity includes automation of agro and irrigation services, water level monitoring, and data gathering for milk and agri-cooperatives, fisheries, poultry and soil analysis.

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