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India, Jio, and the Four Internets

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Re: India, Jio, and the Four Internets

#171

Post by kamaal »

zapdrive wrote: post #158
op03 wrote: post #86

Too much overconfidence in Reliance. This is the same firm well known for totally missing the boat on India's IT boom. It has done a great job deploying the network. Unmatched probably anywhere in the world. But that set of skills has nothing to do with charting out a vision that will work in future. That set of skills to rollout a network at huge scale quickly, existed in India because of cut throat competition in t…

> well known for totally missing the boat on India's IT boom. There's two different Reliances. When the old Papa died, the two Ambani boys divided his empire into two. The older one kept the oil etc, and the younger one got telecommunications etc. There was some agreement of not competing for X years. The younger brother's telco failed miserably and had to be bailed out by the elder. After that the elder went ahead a…

Reliance at heart is basically a reseller. This is where their business acumen matters so much. A good reseller has to be very good at running everyday affairs. Operations, expenses and ensuring profits on unit sold have to be optimized.

Making profits as a reseller demands being good at raising funds, negotiating deals/purchases/contracts, packaging and pricing products correctly, marketing, daily operations etc etc.

So far they took big loans to offer their 4G plans for dirt cheap prices. Now they are selling their company in pieces to pay loans and be free of debt.

How will they price things going forward? Well time will tell. But it's one of those companies and business, where they have to turn in profits. They can't exactly show ads and make money like big web companies do.

Re: India, Jio, and the Four Internets

#172

Post by entha_saava »

op03 wrote: post #86

Too much overconfidence in Reliance. This is the same firm well known for totally missing the boat on India's IT boom. It has done a great job deploying the network. Unmatched probably anywhere in the world. But that set of skills has nothing to do with charting out a vision that will work in future. That set of skills to rollout a network at huge scale quickly, existed in India because of cut throat competition in t…

The other firms were worse in vision, thus Jio had an edge.

When I was using internet on a J2ME phone and Opera Mini, it cost INR 4 for 20MB airtime (2G!), which lasted 1 day. A GB of data cost somewhere around INR 250, and lasted a month. [1]

After Jio, these days I get around 30GB of 4G data for INR 150. That's the kind of improvement that changed people's lives.

Yeah the fake news is No. 1 issue in India, WhatsApp and Facebook spoiled this country. The elder generation naively believes what they read on whatsapp and that's terrible. The young generation is driven by emotions and identity politics not logic. But I think that's orthogonal to Jio the company.

[1] It is another thing that Opera Mini was freaking fast even on that network and didn't spend even 10MB per day for casual web page browsing. But if you want to get PDF or media content the internet was both slow and expensive.

Re: India, Jio, and the Four Internets

#173

Post by harpratap »

mallipeddi wrote: post #77

Can someone who is a domain expert comment on this statement I see being repeated often about Jio's ability to have a significantly lower cost structure by offering only 4G service with 'commodity hardware' versus the legacy players who are operating 2G/3G networks in conjunction with 4G? Is there a lot of truth to this or is this just something that the analysts have heard someplace and are now repeating it faithful…

It is true. The ex-CTO of Jio, Tareq Amin, who pioneered this IP only network in Jio now works for Rakuten in Japan and he repeated the same feat here in even lesser time. You can lookup terms like NFV and Open-RAN to dig deeper. If you're familiar with web-infra it's similar to replacing expensive hardware routers from Cisco with a simple dumb server + FRR

Disclaimer - I work for Rakuten

Re: India, Jio, and the Four Internets

#174

Post by sbierwagen »

unmole wrote: post #169
sbierwagen wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

India doesn't have any semiconductor fabs. If they're not making it in-country, I can't see how it's "homegrown technology".

Ever seen "Designed by Apple in California. Made in China."?

Did Steve Jobs ever say the iPhone is "100% homegrown technology and solution"?

Re: India, Jio, and the Four Internets

#175

Post by sk0g »

trianglem wrote: post #161
signal11 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jio’s offer is really good on paper, but it’s got to be one of the slowest 4G networks I’ve used when I tried it in February. Anyone know if this is because of a lack of competition (there’s effectively one other serious player left in the Indian telco market right now), or capacity constraints?

Interesting. I read an article that mentioned it was the fastest teleco(?) in the world.

Is it? A few replies here are mentioning being happy with ~40 Mbps in bigger cities, meanwhile the last time I ran a speedtest in a busy CBD in Australia I got 600Mbps or so on 4G.

Re: India, Jio, and the Four Internets

#176

Post by hesarenu »

yalogin wrote: post #14
hesarenu wrote: post #2

Jio is the only option for a huge number of Indians - I don't how the author got this impression. There are many other players Airtel,idea even bsnl. The offers are more or less similar. Anyone can switch or use both. My main number is on Airtel and i use jio as well.

Airtel used to be the biggest player and in a few short years it has dwindled to 35% customer base of Jio. The rest of them are tiny compared to even Airtel. So sure you have options for now, but its increasingly looking like there won't be in the future. Also the original statement that Jio is the only option for a majority of Indians is true because a lot of people only joined the mobile revolution because of Jio.

Only option and joining because of jio are two different statements. Author did not do his research or wanted to push his agenda.

Re: India, Jio, and the Four Internets

#177

Post by geodel »

op03 wrote: post #86

Too much overconfidence in Reliance. This is the same firm well known for totally missing the boat on India's IT boom. It has done a great job deploying the network. Unmatched probably anywhere in the world. But that set of skills has nothing to do with charting out a vision that will work in future. That set of skills to rollout a network at huge scale quickly, existed in India because of cut throat competition in t…

> This is the same firm well known for totally missing the boat on India's IT boom.

Not setting up a body shopping entity is hardly big loss to Reliance.

> that set of skills has nothing to do with charting out a vision that will work in future.

How have IT/Retail/Real Estate/ Banking/ Airlines and so on vision worked in India. I see it again none too well. So what's the big deal if Reliance's vision did not pan out.

> But the other stuff, the stuff that actually requires vision, is waiting to blow in India. ...

Same crap, different pile. Good that you have option to move around though.

> This bet on 4G/cloud/platforms etc is not because of some great vision of the future..

No shit. Neither was IT industry. It was just labor cost arbitrage.

> Plus there is the small issue of huge existing players who are not exactly lining up to bend over to the Ambanis.

Could be that they live in caves in Himalayas or deep under Arabian sea. Never heard of those "huge existing players" in India who are not bending over to Ambani.

Re: India, Jio, and the Four Internets

#178

Post by noisy_boy »

signal11 wrote: post #22
varbhat wrote: post #5

Back in 2015, costs for internet were not cheap,here in India. There were many who couldn't afford (including me).In those days(2015), I used to be on 2KBps network(You read it right, kilobytes per second). It was Idea Cellular's ₹68 2G plan(USD 0.91) where it provided 1Gigabyte of data for month. 3G plans were costlier. There was no 4G until Nov/Dec of 2015 when Airtel introduced 4G(it was hyped,but it was also cost…

Jio’s offer is really good on paper, but it’s got to be one of the slowest 4G networks I’ve used when I tried it in February. Anyone know if this is because of a lack of competition (there’s effectively one other serious player left in the Indian telco market right now), or capacity constraints?

Typical Indian cities/towns are not very well planned (Chandigarh being an exception). Narrow alleyways, haphazardly shaped houses/neighbourhoods are generally the norm (especially in smaller towns). Beyond the backbone (which tends to be pretty good in general across ISPs), the main factor of speed of mobile internet, which Indians mostly use for accessing internet, is directly proportional to the reach of the cell tower to the consumer. I have seen excellent speeds in one room of a house and not so great at another room of the same house with Jio and Airtel.

Re: India, Jio, and the Four Internets

#179

Post by addicted »

While Jio was a revolution in India, this article misses a lot of context.

One of the primary reasons competitors could not respond was a combination of some trumped up scams which had them tied up in legal hassles when it came to allocations or frequencies for years, and because in a moment of some of the greatest idiocy every, the Indian legal system allowed the government to apply new taxation laws retroactively, leading to many competitors owing sums of many that was multiples of any possible revenue they earned and could have expected to earn in decades.

In a further move of genius, the courts declared, in a completely unenforceable ruling, that their parent foreign investors were liable for the taxes breaking limited liability, and trying to apply Indian “laws” (this wasn’t really a law but something the court made up) abroad.

It’s still not enforceable, but it froze any further investment from the majority of Jio’s competitors.

Re: India, Jio, and the Four Internets

#180

Post by product50 »

jay_kyburz wrote: post #159
product50 wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow - such great companies. I am flattered. Please be real. US has FB, Google, MSFT, Apple. China has Tencent, Alibaba, Bytedance. And look at the list you have come up for Europe.

Yea but, who cares about Unicorns. Their investors. The rest of us would prefer smaller companies and more competition.

I hope you realize that in your definition of "us" it is just you and a small grp of your European friends. Rest of Europe are busy searching on Google and sharing photos on Instagram.
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