Telecommunication penetration for voice and mobile broadband key to Indian GDP growth. Is policy makers pulling it down?

Past 7 years has seen Indian economy growing at rapid pace and being rated as most stable market. Companies have taken global outlook and no company can survive being regional specific without exploiting economies of scale and efficieny by integrating global resources. Taking the lead most IT companies , TATA Motors, TATA steel, Mahindra and now telecom giant Airtel has taken giant step in being global players. Indian companies have shown they can compete globally.

Telecom sector over this period has seen massive price reduction and telephone connection has become effortable to common people . This penetration in telephone connection has been driven by widespread availability of low cost prepaid connections and mobile handset. Creadit must be given to business model of Indian operators led by Airtel in moving to outsourcing model and paying per capacity used. This low cost model in offering voice minutes has credited to deep penetration of mobile connections.

India is one of the country where cost of mobile communication is least. From user perspective there has been no demand to reduce this further but need to have customized product packages catering to their requirements.

All these factors have made telecom business very lucrative and has been envy of other industries.

There has been lots of changes in past one year which is concern as citizen of this country:

1. Too many licenses were given to new operators at low cost , leading to short term unrealistic cost of services , making business unviable for most of them . No where in the world more than 3-4 operators are permitted to operate in same region. Some of them have taken licenses and sold equity at exhorbitant rate.

2. This also led to precious spectrum being unavailable for major operator who needs it due to higher subscribers but being unutilized by new entrants as subscribers are less.

3. Price of 3G spectrum has been very high as existing operator needs spectrum to support voice in key cities where their spectrum is choked to address subscriber addition. This will have impact on data penetration.

4. Broadband wireless access (BWA) license and spectrum is virtually own by one company which is not good for consumers and country.

5, Regulatory and policies have become major risk factor in teelcom business as compared to technology becoming outdated or customer taste changing .

All the above will have following impact:

1. Operators will start refocussing where money can be generated rather than pushing for rural penetration which they have been focussing.

2. Data reachability to rural and semi urbal will be slow against anticipation and government goal for broadband penetration will suffer.

3. Opportunity to extend eHealth , eEducation and eGoverance to rural and far distance locations will have huge imapct

4. Money collected from auction of spectrun will be used for covering country fiscal deficit which is easy way to do rather then bringing effiecieny in goverment spending.

With none of the policies pro commuincation infrastructure development and exhorbitant prices of licenses will have definite imapct on overall GDP in long run and bridging urbal - rural gap.

Need is to have policies which provides low cost communication to people of this country and at same time telecom industry should be attractive to investors.

"View expressed above in this post are individual assesment"

With Wireless broadband driving penetration of data access in India , Machine to Machine Communication will have huge impact on society

MACHINE TO MACHINE COMMUNICATION

M2M is about enabling the flow of data between machines and machines and ultimately machines and people. Regardless of the type of machine or data, information usually flows in the same general way -- from a machine over a network, and then to a system where it can be reviewed and acted on.

There are four basic stages that are common to just about every M2M application. Those components are:

• 1) Collection of data
• 2) Transmission of selected data through a communication network
• 3) Assessment of the data
• 4) Response to the available information

1) Collection of Data

The intelligence of a monitored machine may be as simple as a temperature sensor,water level indicator, electricity meter reading , weather , under sea condition, traffic conditions etc.

The goal of the M2M hardware is to bridge the intelligence in the machine with the communication network.

2) Transmission of data through a communication network

There are several good options for transporting data from the remote equipment . The cellular network, telephone lines, and communication satellites are all common solutions.

In India with low penetration of telephone lines and remote areas to capture data wireless media will be key. This will be cost effective solution.

3) Assessment of the data

Data from machines usually shows up in one of two places: in an enterprise software application the company already uses, or in a standalone system designed specifically for M2M.

Still, the vast majority of opportunities for M2M center around taking data out of machines and integrating it with operational data. For example, remote monitoring data can be incorporated into customer-relationship management systems for logging service and maintenance history.

4) Response to the available information

Whether the application is standalone or part of a larger system, the common goal is to automate a business process by automating the flow of data to the people and systems that have a need to know. The technology should enable sending the right data to the right place in the right way depending on the circumstances. It should also present data to individual users based on their specific function in the business process.

Some uses of M2M communication are:

1. A modern farmer who has automated irrigation systems operating in different locations can now be constantly aware of their operation based on short messages that are relayed cell phone.

2. Electricity meter reading from households and offices by electricity supplier.

3. Monitoring water level to avoid floods.

4. Monitoring appliances like washing machine, microwave etc at home and operating them over mobile phones.

M2M is not only receiving data from machine but sending actions back to machine to act upon.

There are unlimited opportunities to harness raw data in machine and integrate them into system to enable analytical decisions and control

Mobile broadband Pricing usage based or unlimited usage. AT&T in USA changed its offering from unlimited to usage based.

With mobile internet access to contents and applications through smart phones and laptop on exponential surge, mobile operators are put to task on planning capacity.

According to stats 10% usage of traffic is to social networking sites facebook, twitter and 15 % is to Youtube downloads. Skype accounts for 5% traffic.
Applications like facebook and twitter are not bandwidth hungry whereas video downloads from Youtube consumes bandwidth. Imagine if facebook adds video and bandwidth hungry applications.

Application and mobile phone behaviour becomes important on mobile networks. Improper application and low cost handset in market are not optimized to provide effective utilzation of resources. This will be big challenge in developing market in india. Providers of mobile handset like Blackberry claim their handset provides optimized performance with effective utilization of limited resources.
Should applications and mobile handset who have optimized performance be penalized against applications and mobile handset provides who are not optimized in performance.

AT&T in USA launched unlimited plans and exlusive iPhone. iPhone provides true touch screen experience to end user in using smartphones. This created explosive growth of traffic on AT&T network. With AT&T announcement to remove unlimited plan and introduce usage based plan any indicator for future tariff plans. Sprint and T Mobile has not planned to change its plan. At the same time AT&T plan has benefit of low price.

Is exclusive iPhone with AT&T at risk and Apple strategy to offer exlusive with operators right startegy ?

Usage based tariff plans will mean educating customers on handset and application behaviour. This will be bonus for applications and mobile handset which are efficient.

Handling unlimited offers needs to be evaluated in developed market whereas developing market will start with unlimited and will mature in tariff plan as explonential growth will happen.
Other way is to provide unlimted offering on less hungry application and usage based charge on hungry applications.

Will You buy iPad or LapTop ? Who will win the battle and when to use iPad or Laptop?

iPad is planned to be launched in India and it is anticipated that it will cost around INR 35,000.

The Apple iPad is a curious device that is not quite a phone, not quite an iPod and not quite a laptop.

But can it replace your desktop or laptop computer?

The truth is that the iPad could adequately replace the computer depends upon what you want to use for. In many homes it may replace desktop , but whether or not it can replace your desktop or laptop depends entirely on how you use it.

Many people simply use their computer to look up information on the web, check their email, connect with friends on social networking sites like facebook , twitter , YouTube and play games, listen music.

Not only can the iPad do all of that, but it actually provide superior experience non comparable to laptop/desktop.

Gift it to your parents and you will realize. Ease and superior experience is non comparable.

And the iPad can do a lot more than just bringing the web to your .

The iWork suite means you can a bit of work done as well, and with office software moving online, you can simply use the Safari browser to create a new presentation or type up a letter. But with iPad you can not print.

Why wouldn't you replace your computer with an iPad?

iPad has 1 GHz customized ARM processor which is very nothing compared to lowest Atom based processors in laptop. It offers 256 MB RAM whereas 2GB is normal in laptop. Same goes with storage. Screen and keyboards for creating documents is superior in laptop.

If you want to use for creating lots of documents ,writing programmes or creating graphics iPad is not the one you are looking for. It may not replace your office laptop.

The iPad home computer: we are getting close.

As you can see, one of the big hangups with using the iPad as a true computer replacement is the inability to print. Let's face it, most of us find that ability rather handy. Beyond that, power gaming is moving from the PC to the console and the trend towards hosted applications means that more and more of the software we need will be available through a web browser.

iPad is not a replacement for a laptop or desktop computer. But for some, it very well could be the perfect choice.

Watch if your consumer of content or you create lots of content. iPad provide unmatched experience in consuming contents.