why is this article behind a wsj paywall ?
Two Years Ago, India Lacked Fast, Cheap Internet – One Billionaire Changed That
121–130 of 152 posts
Re: Two Years Ago, India Lacked Fast, Cheap Internet – One Billionaire Changed That
#122I live in USA but I am of Indian origin. My parents' apartment in India now has Fiber Internet with 80Mbps at 1000INR (15USD)/month. On my recent travel (Aug 2018), I had Jio and was working remotely. It is so cheap to get Jio. I had 0 issues and I was praising the Internet situation in India for the first time in the last decade. Seriously, good changes in Internet situation. The top challenges for me right now to m…
Jio has enabled a digital revolution, just like Reliance Infocomm did by making all incoming calls free back in 2005 I think. Jio has also made sure that my youtube homepage is filled with soft porn. It is an absolute scourge. WhatsApp rumour mongering has increased a lot with lynchings happening based on the fact that law and order can’t keep up pace with technology. I also see that lots of unemployed people now are…
yeah blame the good internet service for people being lazy or stupid? For every lazy person who spends time just watching videos, there's someone in the village looking at how to use some pesticide or what medicine to take for a certain illness.
The net outcome is what matters and it always is positive.
Re: Two Years Ago, India Lacked Fast, Cheap Internet – One Billionaire Changed That
#123I live in USA but I am of Indian origin. My parents' apartment in India now has Fiber Internet with 80Mbps at 1000INR (15USD)/month. On my recent travel (Aug 2018), I had Jio and was working remotely. It is so cheap to get Jio. I had 0 issues and I was praising the Internet situation in India for the first time in the last decade. Seriously, good changes in Internet situation. The top challenges for me right now to m…
Jio has enabled a digital revolution, just like Reliance Infocomm did by making all incoming calls free back in 2005 I think. Jio has also made sure that my youtube homepage is filled with soft porn. It is an absolute scourge. WhatsApp rumour mongering has increased a lot with lynchings happening based on the fact that law and order can’t keep up pace with technology. I also see that lots of unemployed people now are…
I think blame lies with Youtube team, for them not able to morderate their default homepage. I distinctly remember same crappy default youtube homepage before Jio also.
Re: Two Years Ago, India Lacked Fast, Cheap Internet – One Billionaire Changed That
#124I'm on Jio and paying $5 for 84 days. I get 1. Free voice calls 2. 100 SMS/ day 3. 1.5GB High speed data/ day (20+ MBPS)- Post which unlimited @ 64 Kbps 4. Subscription to Jio apps like Music/ Movies/ News The page shows pricing at $5.7, everyone I know has always received a discount voucher for Rs 50. https://www.jio.com/en-in/4g-plans
I am green with envy. South Africa, data is so expensive I literally only check my WhatsApp messages when using cellular networks. Everything else I do when I connect to ADSL backed WiFi connection. Here are two deals being advertised on Vodacom (vodafone), the largest cellular network in SA. Per month. (Yes it is MB not GB). $35 400 Minutes 900MB 400 SMSs $50 600 Minutes 1200MB 600 SMSs Note: Rand has dropped from U…
You can get an LTE data-only SIM capped to 1GB for $5/mo (ZAR 67) from Axxess[1]. Granted - it's not unlimited and doesn't include calls and SMS, but it's much better deal than Vodacom - for data.
Re: Two Years Ago, India Lacked Fast, Cheap Internet – One Billionaire Changed That
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
For 80$ per month in Canada: - Unlimited call + texts - 6GB per month And this is considered a good deal
Practically every product/service I can think of is more expensive here than other countries, namely the U.S. Yet the wages aren't exactly higher than other developed countries like the U.S. I don't really get it.
fewer people is probably the issue, fewer people to spread the cost of R&D or infrastructure onto = higher cost per person. Just a guess though.
Re: Two Years Ago, India Lacked Fast, Cheap Internet – One Billionaire Changed That
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
Leaving aside the fact that Jio seems to be an Uber-like play and the prices aren’t sustainable, there are several other problems with your argument. In the west, the cost of building and maintaining telecom networks is dominated by labor costs. Jio is paying Indian wages to lay and splice backhaul fiber, or to fix a downed line, not US or German wages. And even in the US or Germany, this isn’t minimum wage work—it r…
>Jio is paying Indian wages to lay and splice backhaul fiber, Dude. Charter Communications posted 10 billion dollars net income for 2017. They have under 100,000 employees. They could raise each of their employees' wages by $100K and still have money left over at the end of the year. It ain't the wages.
There's several things wrong with that statement.
1) Charter didn't really make $10 billion in profit last year. That figure is the result of a one-time accounting change: https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/charter-announces-f.... This happened to many companies last year--when the corporate tax rate was lowered, they had to re-valuate any tax assets or liabilities using the new rate: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/with-deferred-liabilities-.... That resulted in big one-time gains or losses depending on whether the company had deferred tax assets or deferred tax liabilities. Microsoft booked a $6.3 billion loss in Q2 of this year for similar reasons. That doesn't mean Microsoft is losing money hand over fist!
2) It's more useful to look at Charter's income from operations (page 31 of their 2017 annual report: http://ir.charter.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=112298&p=irol-reportsa...). That has ranged from $3 to 4 billion over the last few years on about $40 billion in revenue. That means that if Charter merely tried to break even, it could lower customer prices by about 10%.
3) Also useful is the breakdown of expenses, which starts at page 37 of the annual report. Out of $40 billion in revenues, $26 billion was spent on operating expenses. Of that, $10.6 billion is the cost of buying video programming, while the rest is maintenance, support, overhead, etc. That $15 billion-ish is dominated by labor costs. Then there is another $10 billion in depreciation, which is the annual decrease in the value of the actual network. The cost of building the network is not counted as an expense, but is instead booked as a capital asset. Each year, the accounting of income accounts for the decreasing value of that asset. That depreciation also reflects primarily labor costs (i.e. the labor costs incurred in building the asset).
4) Much of the plant maintenance and construction is handled by contractors, who wouldn't be counted in the 100,000 employees.
Re: Two Years Ago, India Lacked Fast, Cheap Internet – One Billionaire Changed That
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hi Piyush. Great points but would like to say that not even half of India has access to internet just yet. While Jio is certainly expediting this growth, we have a long way to go. You can find my reference here: https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/business/india-business/...
One reason could be lack of very cheap Smartphones. I mean like good sub 1000 rupees phones. India has a great Android phone ecosystem and the sub 10,000 rupee phones are really good. But 10,000 rupees is still quite a bit of cash for many people.
In my personal experience, poor population actually doesn't care about 'smartphone', though they care about 'Whatsapp'. Thankfully, Jio is bringing around 2000 INR (~28 USD) feature phones too, that will still run Whatsapp and Facebook etc.
Re: Two Years Ago, India Lacked Fast, Cheap Internet – One Billionaire Changed That
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
In the UK I have do all that on a a VDSL connection capped to 120GB per month and at four times the price.
Why did you choose a capped VDSL connection, then? Unlike the US, we have real uncapped plans. As for price... go visit India and see if you can work out why people might not be able to pay as much for services, and why it might be possible to provide those services cheaper. Hint - people don’t get paid as much.
That's only part of the story, India greatly benefits from population density in urban areas.
Re: Two Years Ago, India Lacked Fast, Cheap Internet – One Billionaire Changed That
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are you f@cking kidding me? There is literally no excuse for companies to charge us the way they do in the west at this point.
Leaving aside the fact that Jio seems to be an Uber-like play and the prices aren’t sustainable, there are several other problems with your argument. In the west, the cost of building and maintaining telecom networks is dominated by labor costs. Jio is paying Indian wages to lay and splice backhaul fiber, or to fix a downed line, not US or German wages. And even in the US or Germany, this isn’t minimum wage work—it r…
Labor costs sound like a weak excuse. Sure I don't expect the same price, but with 1.5gb/day( which realistically speaking is the only thing that matters) I'm paying 180 times more per gb of data.
Re: Two Years Ago, India Lacked Fast, Cheap Internet – One Billionaire Changed That
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
Leaving aside the fact that Jio seems to be an Uber-like play and the prices aren’t sustainable, there are several other problems with your argument. In the west, the cost of building and maintaining telecom networks is dominated by labor costs. Jio is paying Indian wages to lay and splice backhaul fiber, or to fix a downed line, not US or German wages. And even in the US or Germany, this isn’t minimum wage work—it r…
>>All else being equal, the cellular equipment will cost the same I'm not sure where I read this. But I remember reading several years back, Airtel doesn't buy telecom equipment, it actually leases it, and pays for it as it goes. Which is why the prices were so low even for a new tech rollout like 4G. Not sure if Jio has the same model. >>Telecom infrastructure is like any other infrastructure—vastly more expensive t…
Airtel did used to buy equipment indirectly, by paying dollars per capacity (erlang model) and letting the vendor figure out what that involved regarding equipment. But they moved away from this a few years ago to a more traditional model of just buying equipment, along with making some other major changes to the way they buy IT services as well.
I used to do some work at Airtel but I cross checked what I posted here against publicly available information, for example from https://www.zdnet.com/article/airtel-chops-ibm-contract-in-h...