NEW DELHI: The level of congestion among the networks of different cellular operators has come down considerably in the July-September period, according to telecom regulator TRAI. The performance of the Cellular Mobile Service Providers with respect to the congestion of Point of Interconnections has improved in September, 2007 with the number of POIs with congestion coming down significantly to 348 against 457 in June 2007, TRAI said in a statement. According to the benchmark notified by TRAI in the Quality of Service regulation, the POI should be less than 0.5 per cent of the the calls made from one network to another. Read the full story in ‘The Economic Times’ here.
Swami is an employee of My Mobile store in Noida can tell how the mobile business at his store has been dwindling in one of the most popular markets in New Delhi region for mobile phones and its accessories. Before January, My Mobile would sell goods worth about Rs 2.5 lakh on any given Sunday but sales started dipping about four to five months ago and the Sunday before Christmas, which should have been a busy period, with sales being down in the range of Rs1 lakh. “Our future is in danger,” Swami says pointing to a Sony Ericsson Mobile Communications’ service centre that doubles as mobile phone retail store located bang opposite My Mobile outlet. The Sony store opened a year ago.
A major telecom event in one of the most exciting markets in the world, India, is underway in New Delhi, Dec 12-14, 2007. LIRNEasia presented its teleuse@BPO research at the first session: rs_indiatelecom07_final.ppt/ The central message was that India had to take the road less traveled by, focusing on developing the mobile as an interface to the Internet and its communication, information retrieval, publishing, transacting, etc. functionalities, if it is not to leave behind the people at the Bottom of the Pyramid. A most fascinating presentation by Steve Rondel of Conversay showed that voice interface with the mobile was not as distant as some think it might be.
On Monday, November 19th, Rohan Samarajiva, Nuwan Waidyanatha, and Natasha Udu-gama of LIRNEasia, along with Menake Wijesinghe of Sarvodaya‘s Community Disaster Management Centre went to New Delhi, India for the second in a series of workshops on the “Evaluating Last-Mile Hazard Information Dissemination” (HazInfo) entitled “Sharing Knowledge on Disaster Warning: Community-Based Last-Mile Warning Systems” at the India Habitat Centre in conjunction with the All India Disaster Management Centre (AIDMI). The workshop included a variety of stakeholders from Indian government, civil society, international organizations, private sector, and NGOs. Mr. Mihir Bhatt, Honorary Director of AIDMI, along with Mr. Mehul Pandya, Risk Reduction Transfer Initiative Coordinator and Ms.
India’s mobile phone market has become the fastest growing in the world, with Indians adding nearly six million new connections every month. As Anjana Pasricha of VoA reports from New Delhi, much of the growth is among low-income consumers. Telecom companies are going all out to woo such customers, offering them deals that make cell phones affordable for even those who earn as little as $125 a month. Handsets are available for $45. Users can buy new pre-paid phone cards for less than 50 cents.
New Delhi, (PTI): Cellular operators in the country have asked the Government to go slow on devising regulations on Mobile TV, saying that the technology is “nascent” and the customer behaviour still uncertain. “This is a nascent business and therefore, no decision should be taken which will restrict the development of the market or foreclose technological options,” the Cellular Operators Association of India (COAI) has told the telecom and broadcast regulator TRAI. The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) had last month issued a consultation paper for the stakeholders on issues relating to mobile television. “Various technology solutions are being tested in the global marketplace. It is also important to recognise that customer behaviour and demands are also evolving,” the operators said.
TRAI: SMSs losing their flavour | The Economic Times NEW DELHI: Are text messages slowly losing their flavor with India’s growing cellular base? Even as operators say it’s too early to take a call and make such a ‘sweeping statement’, the figures, however, suggest so. Data compiled by telecom regulator TRAI reveal that SMS use has steadily fallen from September 2006. Consider this: GSM operators have witnessed close to 9% drop in the outgoing SMSs during the April – June quarter, as per the latest performance indicator report by TRAI. This implies, an average GSM user now sends about 35 SMSs per month as compared to 39 during the previous quarter.
On October 25, 2007, LIRNEasia will hold its first regional dissemination workshop for the “Evaluating Last Mile Hazard Information Dissemination” (HazInfo) pilot project at the Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (BUET) through its Bangladesh Network Office for Urban Safety (BNUS) in Dhaka, Bangladesh. The purpose of the workshop is to gather experts, practitioners and community organizations to discuss the findings of the HazInfo project and determine ways in which the project may be developed to suit community-based hazard information dissemination regionally. The “Sharing Knowledge on Disaster Warning: Community-based Last-Mile Warning Systems” workshop in Dhaka will feature five presenters from government, academia and NGOs. Dr. A.
BANGALORE, India (AFP) — India remains the favoured technology outsourcing destination, an industry report said Sunday, amid concerns a rising rupee and soaring wages would blunt the country’s competitive edge. A study by industry publication Global Services and investment advisory firm Tholons put the Indian cities of Chennai, Hyderabad and Pune at the top of a list of 15 emerging outsourcing destinations for global companies. Kolkata at number five and Chandigarh at number nine were the other two Indian locations on the list, which contained three Chinese and two Vietnamese cities as well.
LIRNEasia research on Telecom Regulatory Environment (where India gets the lowest scores on the USO dimension) shows that Indian USO policy and implementation are flawed. LIRNEasia research on teleuse at the Bottom of the Pyramid shows clearly that lowering connection charges and keeping the use charges low are critically important in connecting the next billion. The policy recommendation that flows from this, made at meeting of regulators in New Delhi on the 15th of July, is that the USO levy should be phased out and the existing funds be disbursed as quickly as possible. But it appears that the Department of Telecommunications and the new Minister think otherwise: The Hindu Business Line : Raja rejects telecom industry plea to cut USO levy Operators had said that since the USO fund has over Rs 10,000 crore lying unused, the Government should consider lowering the contribution made by the telecom firms. “We realise that USO is an important tool to enable telecom services in rural areas.
Supriya Shrinate | NDTVProfit.com, India Friday, March 23, 2007 (New Delhi): Sunil Mittal, Anil Ambani and now Arun Sarin may be the fiercest of rivals in the telecom battlefield but there’s one thing that all telecom bosses agree on that. It is the farmers in rural India and fishermen in distant shores, who will drive the next phase of growth for telecom. Little wonder then, networks are being rolled out to tap this bottom of the pyramid (BOP) as it is fashionably called. In fact according to a survey by LIRNEasia, the BOP segment makes about 35 calls on an average every month, which includes both incoming and outgoing calls.
VRISHTI BENIWAL | The Financial Expresss, India NEW DELHI, MAR 25: Have you ever heard of Internet? As strange and shocking as this question is the fact that a sizeable chunk of India’s population doesn’t know what Internet is! About 72% people in the lower socio-economic strata of the country have never heard the word ‘Internet’, according to a study whose key findings were recently presented to the Cellular Operators Association of India and Universal Services Obligations Fund. The study will be released next year. [Note: This study, Teleuse@BOP was released in Singapore on 28 February 2007.
VRISHTI BENIWAL | The Financial Express India NEW DELHI, MAR 23: Over 200 billion telephone users and 7 million subscriber addition a month may paint a rosy picture, but the telecom boom is yet to ring loud in rural India. Believe it or not, 82% people at the bottom of pyramid (BoP) in India use someone else’s phone. Only 9% people in India use their own mobile phones and an equal percentage use their household fixed line phone, according to a yet-to-be-released study ‘Teleuse on a Shoestring’ by a Sri Lanka-based non-profit research organisation LIRNEasia. [Note: This study, Teleuse@BOP was released in Singapore on 28 February 2007.] Read full article | See print article
The TRE 2006 results [PDF Download] of the first Telecom Regulatory Environment (TRE) survey applied across six Asian countries were released in New Delhi yesterday. The TRE Assessment, developed by LIRNEasia and already implemented in a number of countries, is a perceptual index which gauges regulatory performance across six dimensions. The TRE survey carried out in India, Indonesia, Pakistan, Philippines, Sri Lanka and Thailand as part of a multi-component study, closely reflected regulatory reform actions undertaken in the respective countries along with sector performance. The Hindustan Times, a leading newspaper in India, covered the findings from the TRE surveys [PDF Download] focusing on the comparison between India and Pakistan’s scores. Pakistan Bests India in Telecoms Regulation by M.
The Study of India’s Universal Service Instruments by LIRNEasia researchers Payal Malik & Harsha De Silva, critiqued the Indian government’s policy that made only fixed line operators eligible for USO funds: As of today, the government is giving USO fund support to only the fixed line operators offering services in the rural areas. The over defining terms in the law is a bad idea in a rapidly evolving technology environment, though this correction has been suggested it is quite possible that the previous auctions have left huge amounts of rents that have been appropriated by the incumbent. In an industry that manifests the potential for rapid technological change and innovation, such as telecom, an economic analysis of a problem should not focus too narrowly or exclusively on the best use of society’s resources from the standpoint of today’s technology and resource availability i.e. static economic efficiency but should be viewed from a dynamic perspective.
(Associated Press via NewsEdge) Cellular phone subscribers rose in India by a record 6.6 million in October, keeping the country’s place as the world’s fastest-growing mobile phone market, according to data released over the weekend. Subscribers for the GSM network grew by 4.7 million in September, while the number of mobile phone subscribers using CDMA technology increased by 1.9 million.