• is charged for a completed call even though the call was never connected.
• is charged for call set-up time rather than actual conversation time.
• is charged for his service provider’s deliberate attempt to re-route his call to automated messaging platforms.

Any of the above is a criminal act and FAS must be prohibited. The industry has, however, moved faster than the governments. Tata Communications has recently disconnected nearly a dozen unscrupulous carriers as part of its proactive actions to stamp out FAS.

Teaming up with the world’s top 10 wholesale Voice carriers, Tata has formed global FAS Forum. It provides educational outreach on FAS and a unified approach to developing and implementing steps to tackle the problem.

Have you seen your long distance phone bill lately? Is everything OK? If it is a prepaid connection - you are, possibly, just among the billions of unlucky.

But you need a minimum 5 MBps link for a two-way; we used 15MBps for the three-location conference. The connection dropped once, but otherwise performance was great. The question is whether we can assemble 15 MBps reliable quality in LK. I would hazard a guess that the first real working telepresence system (beyond those now operational at the World Bank, the Distance Learning Center, etc. with lower quality and bandwidth demands) will come up at a place like the Taj Samudra, where it is not too difficult to ensure a high-quality 15 MBps link.

The New York Times has a story:

In fact, people in the growing high-technology end of the industry, which is called “telepresencing,” say the Skype-type systems have helped videoconferencing gain traction. The technique has given life to “the general idea that video is a realistic possibility to communicate for business,” said Marc Trachtenberg, the chief executive and co-founder of Teliris, which is a major player in telepresencing, along with competitors like Cisco Systems.

With the highest-end Teliris product (Cisco has a similar product), you see a space that looks like a half of a conference room and you face a wall of up to six high-definition screens that give the illusion that people in a similar room in another location are in the same place.

After a while, it isn’t easy to tell where the real room ends and the virtual room begins. The system costs $150,000 to $200,000 a unit. A much less expensive option is a high-definition desktop system that costs under $10,000. All are mutually compatible.

Qualcomm claims that CDMA handset prices in India were already some of the lowest in the world and that royalty was only about $2 per handset. It further argues that Reliance’s move into GSM has to do with flawed spectrum policy of the Indian Telecom Ministry (DoT) that provides more than twice the spectrum to GSM operators compared to CDMA operators like Reliance. This is because according to Qualcomm, GSM technology allows only a finite number of subscribers in a cell whereas the CDMA technology on the other hand poses no such restrictions. “For instance India’s GSM operators get 4.4 MHz of spectrum initially while CDMA operators get 2.5 MHz. But when the subscribers of GSM operators cross one million they become eligible for a total of 10 MHz. For crossing that level, the CDMA operators get only 5 MHz. That’s because DoT, the spectrum allocater, feels that since the CDMA technology can carry about five times more traffic, it can operate efficiently with much lower spectrum.”

The announcement by Reliance has however spurred Qualcomm CEO, Paul Jacobs, to visit India and meet with Reliance and Tata, the two dominant CDMA operators. India contributes 2.2% of all Qualcomm royalty revenues and 8.8% of CDMA handsets sold worldwide. Jacobs is also meeting with the Indian regulator TRAI and the DoT minister.  Although Qualcomm has ruled out lowering  royalty fees it is promising increased investment and contributions in kind. The above issues are discussed in detail here:

Telcos in a spectrum jam

 Qualcomm says no to royalty cut