Links for 2007-05-08

Posted on May 8, 2007 by Neha Viswanathan

About Neha Viswanathan

Neha Viswanathan. City-hopping, trivia-gathering, identity-hunting. Obsessions include culture, social software, cities, literature, internet, music, history, marketplace and anything that doesn't twinkle.
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7 Responses to Links for 2007-05-08

  1. km says:
    May 9, 2007 at 12:02 am

    Let me take a contrarian stance here (zimbly because arguing is more fun than agreeing):

    Why shouldn’t the government be in the business of telecom? Broadband/WiFi are like roads and state parks, no?

  2. desi witch says:
    May 9, 2007 at 12:44 am

    to spy on us my dear!

  3. Nilu says:
    May 9, 2007 at 10:31 am

    If the government is not in the business, who will be our minister of telecoms? The government does business here so that we can nattufy the Tamil kodi in Delhi.

  4. Alok says:
    May 9, 2007 at 9:24 pm

    Well, considering that the government owned company is the only thing keeping mobile operators from raising local call prices, I am actually beginning to think having a government owned telco competing in the market is a good thing. The Cellular Operators Association of India is a thinly veiled cartel whose members raise prices in concert. The only telco keeping them in check is BSNL. It isn’t as if the cartel isn’t making profits. Check their balance sheets. Yet infrastructure rampup simply isn’t keeping pace with demand for some strange reason.

    As for the internet, if you will look, each and every ISP in the country merely waits for BSNL to reduce broadband prices. They then reduce prices to keep their own only slightly higher than BSNL’s. Why do you think the internet market in the country is still so below potential? It is because owners of submarine cables and landing stations have been trying their best to restrict access (and rake in money) to bandwidth, making it a scarce commodity in the Indian marketplace. Prime accused are VSNL, who expected to retain their monopoly on international bandwdith for ever, and Bharti, who didn’t exactly set the telephone lines on fire with all the bandwidth they had access to.

    The delay in getting DSL everywhere in the country was because all ISPs waited for TRAI to force unbundling of BSNL’s copper last mile lines. They did not want to invest in a long term infrastructure solution. Unfortunately for the telcos and ISPs, BSNL didn’t let unbundling of their own copper happen. So now the telcos have started laying fibre all over the country – something that should have been done half a decade ago. TRAI’s usual bumbling on the issue (as they did on DTH, 3G and are now doing with WiMAX) did not help.

  5. Naren says:
    May 10, 2007 at 10:55 am

    Alok,
    Wow! You seem to know the reason for everything. I think you are God!

  6. Alok says:
    May 10, 2007 at 2:16 pm

    I just might be!

  7. Amit says:
    May 18, 2007 at 8:57 pm

    well, I do agree with Alok on mobile tariff issue. 1 of the reasons b’coz of which we enjoy one of the lowest call rates in world is bcoz of govt players like BSNL & MTNL else pvt operators wud have had us paying quite a lot for calls.