BPL Mobile Plan
Plan Name: 199 Jodi (pair) Plan
Monthly Rent: Rs. 199
Inter-calling between Jodi: free
Local Calling: 50 paise/minute
Local SMS: Re. 1
National Calling: Re. 1/minute
National SMS: Rs. 1.5
CLIP: Free
Monday, January 5, 2009
Vodafone Post-paid Offer
Hyderabad, Jan. 2
Cellular services provider Vodafone Essar has launched `Mee Kosam', an offer that allows postpaid customers in the State to make their own tariff plans. The customers can choose from a value pack comprising over 27 tariff options offering various combinations between call and SMS rates and free minutes. The rental would be Rs 100 per month. "The initiative will give customers the total freedom to design the monthly package to suit their needs," Mr S. Murali, Chief Operating Officer, Vodafone Essar, Andhra Pradesh, said in a release.
Source:- HBL
RCOM Mumbai Fight
Mumbai, Jan 4 Anil Ambani-led Reliance Communications on Sunday announced the launch of its GSM services in Mumbai.
This follows the launch of its countrywide GSM services, across 11,000 towns, on December 30, 2009.
Along with the Mumbai launch, R-Com also announced a Customer Experience Programme that offers up to 100 per cent savings to sub-Rs 300 ARPU mobile customers in the city of Mumbai at a one-time subscription charge (including GSM SIM) of Rs 25, said a press release issued by the company.
According to the plan, customers will get Rs 900 minutes of talk time on local calls and SMS to any network that can be accrued by Reliance Mobile GSM customers in daily tranches of Rs 10 spread over 90 days.
In addition, customers choosing the CEP can make unlimited calls between 11 pm to 6am to any Reliance numbers in Mumbai, Maharashtra and Goa. The sub-Rs 300 ARPU segment is the largest and fastest segment of mobile subscribes in the country, said the press release.
The release also quoted Mr Dinesh Gulati Regional Head (West), Reliance Communications, as saying, “The Customer Experience Programme, Reliance Mobile GSM’s first offering, is in line with Reliance Communications’ Philosophy of making world-class telephony services accessible and affordable to the masses.”
Read more...RCOM`S GSM
| Roll-out done 6 months ahead of schedule. |
New service: Mr Anil Ambani, Chairman, Reliance Communications, addressing a press conference in Mumbai on Tuesday.The company announced the launch of its nationwide enhanced GSM service, which will cover 11,000 towns across the country (Report on Page 4).
Our Bureau
Mumbai, Dec. 30 The Anil Ambani-led Reliance Communications on Tuesday announced the launch of its nationwide enhanced GSM service.
It will cover 11,000 towns across the country in the initial stage and will span across the nation within a few months. “Starting tomorrow, our GSM service will be available in 11,000 towns in India. We will be doubling it in next few months to over 24,000 towns and six lakh villages. Our GSM service will cover all railway routes and national and state highways,” said Mr Anil Ambani, Chairman, Reliance Communications.
Reliance Communication has spent Rs 10,000 crore for the rollout of the nationwide network of the GSM service. Mr Ambani said the company would spend a few thousand crore more as the incremental investment into the venture. He said that the company’s GSM rollout project is six months ahead of its schedule. “Reliance completes in 15 months what other operators have taken 15 years to complete,” he said.
Wider rangeWith the launch of its enhanced GSM service, Reliance’s customers will be able to use the widest range of 300 handsets and devices, according to Mr Ambani. “Through our global partnership on both CDMA and GSM services, our customers will now able to roam on more networks globally in more than 200 countries,” he said.
R-Com, which already possesses the nation’s largest CDMA network, will now have a nationwide GSM network also. Mr Ambani hinted at aggressive marketing initiatives on the back of two strong networks. “Through our nationwide GSM launch coupled with our continued focus on CDMA network, we will endeavour to rewrite the rules of the industry,” he said. He made it clear that the two technology platforms will be under an integrated brand.
Mr Ambani did not give details about the call rates and price range of the handsets. “This will be announced in next few days,” he said.
The company also plans to launch its GSM services in Sri Lanka and Uganda, where it has recently obtained licences to operate mobile services.
Orders for handsetsThe company sources said that RCom is placing orders with LG, Samsung and Motorola for GSM technology handsets. The entire order is estimated to be worth $ 770 million. “The company is expected to order approximately 7 million handsets from these handset manufacturers. The average cost of each handset will be around Rs 4,000 per piece,” said sources.
On the company’s plans to enter the 3G space, Mr Ambani said the company was looking forward to participating in the 3G bandwidth auction. It plans an investment of between Rs 2,000 to Rs 4,000 crore for its foray into 3G services.
Read more...New Year may make cheap calling.
TRAI indicates that mobile termination charges could be 13 paise a minute compared with 30 paise now
Carriage charges can be as low as 16 paise for each minute compared with 65 paise now
New Delhi, Dec 31 If the telecom regulator’s proposal to bring down various charges payable between operators goes through, mobile tariffs could come down by 20-30 per cent in the New Year.
In a consultation paper issued to review the interconnection usage charges (IUC), the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India has indicated that mobile termination charges could be as low as 13 paise a minute compared to the existing rate of 30 paise a minute. Termination charges are paid by the operators on whose network the call originates to the operator on whose network the call ends.
This means that if a mobile user is currently paying Re 1 per minute for making a local call, he may be able to make the same call at 80 paise a minute.
Mobile users could get further discounts on long distance calls as the regulator has also proposed to reduce the ceiling charges for carriage from the current level of 65 paise a minute. TRAI said that carriage charges can be as low as 16 paise for each minute. Carriage charges are paid by cellular and fixed line service providers to long distance telephone operators.
New players may gainNew players stand to gain if the proposals go through as their pay out in the form of termination charges to existing players will come down substantially. This is expected to be passed on to the subscribers.
Mr Rajiv Mehrotra, Chairman, Shyam Group, said, “TRAI should bring the mobile termination rates to 9 paise a minute. If these charges are lowered then local calls rates will come down to lower than 50 paise a minute.” Shyam is one of the new players, which has partnered with Russian conglomerate Sistema to offer CDMA based mobile services across the country. Other new players include Swan Telecom, Unitech, Datacom and Loop Telecom.
Existing CDMA based mobile operators said that a reduction in termination charges will bring down tariffs. Both Reliance Communication and Tata Teleservices are practically new players in the GSM segment and could gain if the regulator decides on a lower charge.
Mr S.C. Khanna, Secretary General, Association of Unified Telecom Service Providers of India, said, “A reduction in termination rates will encourage new players. It will also benefit the customers as the new operators will be able to offer tariffs that are substantially lower than the existing charges.”
Revenue lossHowever, pan-Indian GSM operators who have a large customer base, will stand to lose on revenues earned from collecting the termination fee. “If international methods are adopted then it would not come down to the levels as is being proposed by the regulator,” said a Cellular Operators Association of India executive.
Going by the division in the industry over the proposal, the telecom regulator will have to do a balancing act.
While TRAI has indicated a lower charge for both carriage and termination charges, the regulator has also given a higher value in the consultation paper.
For example in the case of mobile termination charges, the TRAI has indicated that it could be 28 paise a minute in which case there will be no impact on the tariffs at all. TRAI said that the proposed charges are only indicative.
“The preliminary estimates of ranges in termination and carriage charges are only indicative as the Authority would make appropriate analysis after the methodology and various inputs going into the methodology are firmed up,” TRAI said in a release.
A final decision is expected by March 31, 2009 after taking inputs from the industry. Fixed line subscribers could also benefit as the regulator has indicated that the termination charges for fixed line services could also come down to 19 paise a minute from 30 paise.
But such a move will impact state owned BSNL’s revenues since it will receive lower charges from private operators who terminate their call to any of the PSU’s 35 million fixed line telephone users.
Source:- HBL
Future of Smart Phone & Lapy
Bi-directional currents: 2009 will decide whether customers prefer shrunken notebook forms such as the AspireOne or phones-on-steroids such as the Asus PDA or HTC’s Android-based smart phone.
Anand Parthasarathy
Bangalore, Dec. 31 There are two ways to design a new product: top down or bottom up. And 2009 will decide which one paying customers prefer, when it comes to the single device they would like to use to stay ‘connected’ while on the move.
Given that the market demands a lean-mean-browsing machine, there are two approaches to delivering this; and which one, depends on the manufacturer’s genealogy: If you were a legacy personal computer maker, you would try and squeeze the traditional functions of a desktop or laptop computer into a handy portable frame.
Some early offerings have been about as successful as Cinderella’s sisters trying to wriggle their toes into the glass slipper — and customers have given them a firm thumbs down. More recent offerings of Net Books, Mini Notes, PC Alternates or Ultra Mobile PCs have got the design right — almost; some more than others.
The other approach has come from mobile hand set makers whose premise seems to be: ‘Why should PC makers get all the gravy? Let’s put our smart phones on steroids, till they look and feel like PCs’. Here again, early offerings with their miniature ‘qwerty’ keypads, challenged the user with any but the daintiest finger tips. Customers, like Queen Victoria, said (if not in so many words) ‘We are not amused’.
Creative currents2009 is likely to see these bi-directional creative currents deliver better products — and the early waves have begun lapping Indian shores, even as the old year comes to an end. Consider: Asus, a company which has been all smiles, ever since its Eee PC, caught the public’s fancy on three continents, has hedged its bets and has just launched in the Indian market, the P565, touted as the ‘fastest business PDA ( that’s personal digital assistant) in the world”.
The touch screen device comes with a full suite of office applications and in look and feel might remind Blackberry owners of their first models. The 120-gram machine comes preloaded with SatNav’s 200-city India data base and runs on Windows Mobile version 6.1 professional. The camera is a full 3 megapixel autofocus with MPEG4. The P565 is available from this week for Rs 35,000.
Another year-end launch has been Acer’s most successful mini notebook form in 2008 — the Aspire One — which it prefers to call an Internet Device. This one model allowed the Taiwan-based company to double its total PC sales in the second half of 2008 in markets like Europe, West Asia and Africa (IDC numbers) and in India, Acer is offering one configuration this week, with a 1 GB of RAM, a 160 GB hard disk, a VGA camera and a Linux operating system for Rs 17,499 (plus tax).
It is an astute move: Indian customers seem to prefer a PC, no matter how basic, with its own disk storage and have not been falling over themselves to buy versions that come with 4GB or 8GB flash drives. But Acer can expect to see competition from HP, Toshiba, Asus as well as aggressive Indian players like Zenith in this category.
Android systemThe coming year is also likely to see the emergence of a number of smart phones running Google’s Open Source Android system — the first, from HTC, was seen in a few stands at the India Telecom Show in Delhi earlier in December.
Garmin, better known for GPS-based navigators, has said its own Android-fuelled hand phone will soon be out — and the guessing is the company and quite a few others, will use the upcoming Consumer Electronic Show (CES ’09) in Las Vegas, to launch them.
So will customers go for phones that aspire to be mobile computers or will they respond to laptop makers who say ‘Honey, I’ve shrunk the PC!’ Or will they keep both camps busy and happy? The coming months will tell.
Read more...
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