Harshal

Online shopping in India so far from futurebazaar.com and ebay.in, wherever the deals are better. I have had a decent experience from futurebazaar. Except for once when I ordered a battery charger worth 600 odd bucks and the item was not in stock. I had to write several mails to get them to respond. Finally, they shipped a different more expensive (900 bucks worth) item. I was a little worried if they would charge the higher amount to my CC. But alas, they are still to debit any amount so I was a happy camper in the end. Ebay.in always a good experience, though I have only bought sub 1K type items and only from high rated sellers.

I would think that you would need to make sure it is not a bad ESN in US.

Pakistan

Dig

Nifty

Index

The given url is incorrect. My office has firewall, cant access money control. Tried through a proxy. Pls provide the correct url The URL is correct. Just because your office has a firewall, does not mean the URL is incorrect. I have pasted the transcript for you in my next post Here is a verbatim transcript of the exclusive interview with SP Shukla on CNBC-TV18. Q: Are you focusing as a company purely on a tariff plan to woo away customers or will you have other elements in the pricing strategy that you will unveil shortly? A: There will be more than one element in our strategy. That is why we are taking a segmented approach on a circle-by-circle basis. If you look at our customers, there are from more than one segment. If you look at high-value, high-usage customers they are looking for a new 21st century network, which is H-capable (handheld) and where H actually works on GSM. That happens only when you are not having congestion. So, when you begin with a new congestion free network, with no call drops, no engaged tones, high value customers want to move over there. Even if you match tariffs, they want a better quality network. At the same time, there is another segment which will be value conscious. These are typically low usage users. So, we will have a segmented approach to get high value customers banking on the technical capabilities of our new network, with suitable attractive offers for the value conscious segment. If you are opening in circles, a new operator who is starting a greenfield project has a big advantage. In urban areas, penetration levels are high. You can count upon us to be banking on very high percentage of churn from existing people who will see merit in moving to a new network. In rural areas, penetration is low and you are looking at participating in tremendous growth which is already taking place in the GSM sector. So, there you participate in growth. This is a multiplying strategy which will see us opting for profitable growth in which quality will be the prime factor and tariff will of course play its role. Q: Would you offer significant price advantage to your value conscious customers? A: Advantages can be offered in many ways without affecting your average revenue per user (ARPUs). You can offer more for the same, you can offer the same for less, so there are different approaches through which one can still offer a good deal without affecting your ARPUs. This is what we called bundle offers. Reliance has had tremendous experience from its CDMA part to offer bundle offering and that is the experience we will be leveraging in the field of GSM. So, while we offer value to the customer, we protect our ARPUs. Q: Is that entirely possible for a new entrant into a market, where there are fairly well entrenched players that too in a fairly competitive landscape to come in with attractive offers but even then protect margins at current levels? Would you have to make some sacrifices on margins for starters? A: It is entirely possible. You can offer more for same which means you don’t affect your ARPUs and still offer more minutes to the customer. So, your revenues are protected and customer get a better deal. You can do it only when you have an empty network. Q: You stressed upon some of the quality parameters which you are likely to base your pitch on in the urban areas. But quality parameters only get tested post sampling. Initially, would you look at wooing or churning away some of the established player clients by offering them some better pricing or anything like that, so that they can sample the better quality that you are talking about? A: Absolutely. We are going to be launching an experience campaign so that customers can experience our great network quality. Once they experience the quality they would want to stick on. This will be unveiled in the next few days gradually across all circles one by one. We are customizing it for each circle, depending upon the penetration levels of the circle, depending upon the competition mix, and intensity of competition, because circles are different in their field of competition, and different operators are doing better in different circles. So, we have the late mover advantage. All the lessons of the past have been learnt. There are more than 30 crore people already sitting with GSM handsets, all I need to do is get them to change their SIM card while participating in the growth, which is the one crore new customers coming in every month. So, I participate in the growth of one crore new customers every month, but I have the advantage of attacking simultaneously 30 crore customers who are already there, who have the handset. I don’t have to sell a handset to them, just make them change their SIM card. Q: There will be a limited period introductory pricing even in cities? A: Certainly, there will be. I will look forward to churning you first. Q: Yesterday, Anil Ambani spoke about the kind of capex and investments that he has lined up. I remember that there was some consternation on the part of analysts who track your stock. Back in October-November when you spoke about or indicated that you would probably go little slower on your investment and capex plans, the assumption was that you will deploy maybe 20% less towers than you were originally planning to do before that period. Have those issues been addressed? Are you on target to layout or rollout as aggressively as you were planning before October or is there still a material dip between what you were planning then and what you are planning now? A: Our capex plans has been absolutely on schedule, in fact it is ahead of that. We give our capex guidance in January every year, so that has been right on dot. Our next capex guidance will again be announced early next year. We had indicated that we will be doing GSM launches starting end of this year and will be completing that by the middle of next year. We are right on dot. In fact, we are ahead by few months. We hope to beat our target of middle of next year and are confident of beating it. As Ambani announced yesterday, we today have GSM service in 11,000 towns which is a great beginning. We will double it and take it to 24,000 towns. We are absolutely on dot. What perhaps is been said and that is what I will reemphasise is that a bulk of the capex has already been incurred for our GSM rollout and committed and incurred. Future capex will depend upon the need for capacity and coverage. We will assess how much capex we need to incur. But the start-up capex which is what you need to start the project has been committed, incurred, and completed. Q: I will give you a specific example. Earlier, Reliance Communications has said that they would put up 60,000 towers, which was that scaled back at some point to 48,000 towers. This is probably what created this confusion about lowering capex and investments? A: I think there is confusion between two things. That is the Infratel business and they rollout their plans based on more than one tenant, whereas when you talk about wireless it is the rollout plan of Reliance Communications in the mobility business. So, perhaps more than one number is being discussed. As far as Infratel is concerned, they will definitely meet their rollout target of 60,000 towers without any doubt. Q: As you rollout and maintain two separate networks ‑ GSM and CDMA – it could lead to inefficiencies running dual networks which might impact margins or is that an overstated concern? A: In fact, it is a big advantage for us. We are adjusting infrastructure where we have a tower. The generator set, AC, shelter, etc are all common to both CDMA and GSM. What is incurred incrementally is GSM electronics, which is put on the same tower. Electronics constitutes about 15-20% of the total capex depending upon the intensity of coverage in a particular geography. So, with a small capex I am in a position to launch an all India service. So, it becomes a very big advantage. There is only small incremental cost in terms of electricity consumption. Rentals remain the same, security expenses remain the same. So, we are actually operating two services and not two networks. Operating two services or products to the market is actually done at a very marginal and small incremental cost. Look at the GSM marketing now, our same retail outlets will be stocking up CDMA, GSM talk time, top up vouchers, and recharge vouchers. These same centres will collect the bills. These same collection agencies will send out postpaid bills and collect the monthly bills. At very minimal incremental cost, you can add another service. It is not really two networks being operated. It is two service offerings from the same network. So, it becomes a tremendous advantage. Q: When both the services stabilize, maybe in a couple of quarters, when they are running full tilt and without any kind of initial glitch, do you think Reliance Communications will be able to report the kind of operating margins it works on today or did at last quarter? A: We are confident of meeting the best margin levels in the industry, whichever are prevailing in any quarter.

Sweat

Prasad

Ye, Dual SIM would normally be inferred as Dual GSM. Otherwise it would specifically say GSM+CDMA.

If such prices are offered for mobile then the fixed ISPs are going to face some serious heat. I am paying 700 for 128 kbps UL to VSNL for fixed internet. 550 for 1.8 mbps UL mobile is too good to be true.

Christmas

My opinion is its not even the Atlantic. The place where such technology is born and of course several years ahead of even US, is Japan. Instead of trying to catch up with the West may be we should look a bit east wards. Then may be we will be closer to what West has mass deployed currently.

Do you mean this is a hybrid plan of UL net use + IPTV? Nice offering and seems reasonably priced.

Chicklet

@dkaile I think we ought to start a new one page new users giude topic for 755P like the one above that gives links / post nos to important topics. This topic has become too vast. Only one person could post /edit post in that topic and newbies can continue posting queries only here. So that that post remains manageable and easy to use.

Same here. Very poor CDMA coverage in my office in prime Andheri East MIDC area. Strange.

Ye I too was reading this in DNA today. I am highly doubtful that the celcos will switch off their paying (them not necessarily for the handsets ) customers. It is a shame that the celcos for their small self interest are willing to bend the rules and not ban the stolen handsets. I would think it would be very easy to maintain and share a common (across celcos) list of stolen IMEI and ban them across all networks.

Its really shocking that Nokia is treating their second largest market in such an undignified manner. Down with Nokia.

Government issues notices on illegal mobile handsets news 24 December 2008 Addressing security concerns, the centre has notified the customs department to only allow imports of mobile handsets after the declaration of the 'international mobile equipment identity' (IMEI) numbers of each handset. Separately has the department of telecommunications has also directed all the cellular mobile service providers to make the provision of authentications on mobile handsets with IMEI number for GSM networks and the 'electronic serial number' (ESN) for CDMA networks. Following the recent terrorist strikes in Mumbai, minister of state for communications and information technology Jyotiraditya Scindia told the Lok Sabha this week that henceforth all mobile handsets available in the country wouldhave to carry the IEMI number, which can be identified on the operator's network whenever a call is made from that particular handset. Some media reports suggest that there are over 25 million handsets originating from China and many of them do not carry the mandatory IEMI numbers. The IMEI is a unique 15-digit code that identifies individual mobiles and is used in identifying stolen handsets from making unauthorised calls by legally blocking that particular IEMI code. In many countries an IEMI code is mandatory for all purchases of mobile handsets, but the Indian government has dithered over making it mandatory for only IMEI-coded handsets into the country, despite the spate of terrorist strikes. Security agencies say terorists have been using cheap throwaway Chinese-made handsets that do not have an IEMI number, making the call to the originator untraceable for law enforcement agencies. DoT said in a letter to operators on 6 October, "In the interest of national security, all cellular mobile service providers in unified access service licences (UASL) are hereby directed to make provisions for EIR so that calls without IMEI or with IMEI consisting of all zeroes are not processed, or rejected." "If switches do not have such a facility, the necessary hardware and software should be put in place within three months of the issue date of this letter and compliance reported," it added. The network operators have asked the government for time as they would have to make additional investments in their hardware as well as time to install software since the EIR equipment has to be imported. They have also said that many genuine customers had to be enlightened that software costing a meagre Rs100 can be downloaded into the handset for an IEMI number to be added to the handset. The Chinese make of handsets are popular with many people due to thei low cost as most of them are made in the factories near the Pearl Delta river where no R&D has gone into the making of these handsets as well as extremely low cost chips are used and are rolled out by the millions to be sold to third world countries. Many official vendors in India like Nokia, Sony, Motorola and others have often asked the Indian government to regulate the Chinese imports of low-quality handsets in the past, that affect their own sales. How does this impact us? The users if imported CDMA handsets?

OMG 5000. Too cool.

^^^ Thanks Arun. We Palm users are awaiting the RIMWeb B'Day gift of a separate sub forum.

Happy Birthday! Thanks to all the fellow RIMWebians for helping out and providing all the useful info.

Sadikk can you upload smart movie? How does it compare to CorePlayer?

Try DLing from here http://www.inetbridge.net/forum/driver-mjp...yer-vt1963.html I have not tried it. Post back if it works.