Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

In India, smartphones and cheap data are giving women a voice

wired.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 124 posts

Re: In India, smartphones and cheap data are giving women a voice

#21

Post by varvar »

tmikaeld wrote: post #4

That's an exciting read and it's hard to grasp the sheer numbers involved here, no wonder bandwidth is troublesome at these scales. Feels like this could eventually start a liberating movement for women across the country.

Liberating women from what exactly?

It all seems ridiculous myth making, considering what indians have shared here on HN about how much asymmetrical power indian women have available through the court system in India, and the sort of abuses they inflict regularly, the misuse of the assymetry for material gain etc.

But yeah I get it. It's the new Democracy + Capitalism freedom making program they NEED to go through for their own good.

Re: In India, smartphones and cheap data are giving women a voice

#22

Post by rohan1024 »

op03 wrote: post #16
shripadk wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But the fact that it only costs 9 cents a GB is amazing. It has now reduced to 4 cents per GB for Jio Fiber. I'm sure local ISPs have reduced prices even more just to compete with Jio (in some places you can get 3.3TB for 10$)

At that rate I am guessing the network doesn't have to deal with rain or snow or customer issues cause obviously the budget for all that is not required because how can it even exist? It's following the now classic Facebook model of pointing at scale achieved and outsourcing all the issues that scale produces to someone else namely govts, parents, teachers, the healthcare system, the police etc etc and then blaming a…

They maybe charging customers a penny but they offering services on top of there network and earning tons of money from it.

Re: In India, smartphones and cheap data are giving women a voice

#24

Post by blueblisters »

op03 wrote: post #16
shripadk wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But the fact that it only costs 9 cents a GB is amazing. It has now reduced to 4 cents per GB for Jio Fiber. I'm sure local ISPs have reduced prices even more just to compete with Jio (in some places you can get 3.3TB for 10$)

At that rate I am guessing the network doesn't have to deal with rain or snow or customer issues cause obviously the budget for all that is not required because how can it even exist? It's following the now classic Facebook model of pointing at scale achieved and outsourcing all the issues that scale produces to someone else namely govts, parents, teachers, the healthcare system, the police etc etc and then blaming a…

Service issues do occur but ISPs are getting better at uptime because of the competition. A bigger issue is network saturation, especially for 4G networks. With fiber, on the other hand, some ISPs are offering upto 10-15% more than the quoted bandwidth just because there's plenty of spare capacity. Not sure if that will be the case in a few years.

Re: In India, smartphones and cheap data are giving women a voice

#25

Post by 1f60c »

rohan1024 wrote: post #22
op03 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At that rate I am guessing the network doesn't have to deal with rain or snow or customer issues cause obviously the budget for all that is not required because how can it even exist? It's following the now classic Facebook model of pointing at scale achieved and outsourcing all the issues that scale produces to someone else namely govts, parents, teachers, the healthcare system, the police etc etc and then blaming a…

They maybe charging customers a penny but they offering services on top of there network and earning tons of money from it.

I think GP means that data is so cheap that there won't be any money to fix the cables in case they break due to an extreme weather event.

Re: In India, smartphones and cheap data are giving women a voice

#26

Post by [deleted] »

cageface wrote: post #10
kumarvvr wrote: post #9

Yeah, Data is cheap and smartphones are plenty. Indians are voracious consumers of content and healthy competition has reduced prices to absurdly low levels. I'm in an urban area, with connection from one of the biggest providers. It costs me about 9 USD a month for unlimited data (I mean, about 2 GB a day, BUT, with carry forward, so I have about 250 GB of data to use in my account), unlimited calls and sms. I stopp…

Sounds like it's time to revise some of the advice web developers get about optimizating page sizes for developing markets.

[deleted]

Re: In India, smartphones and cheap data are giving women a voice

#27

Post by vinay427 »

_wldu wrote: post #11
kumarvvr wrote: post #9

Yeah, Data is cheap and smartphones are plenty. Indians are voracious consumers of content and healthy competition has reduced prices to absurdly low levels. I'm in an urban area, with connection from one of the biggest providers. It costs me about 9 USD a month for unlimited data (I mean, about 2 GB a day, BUT, with carry forward, so I have about 250 GB of data to use in my account), unlimited calls and sms. I stopp…

This sounds awesome. Good, affordable connectivity seems to be a basic human right. I wish it was this way everywhere. I'm in the US and can only get 1.5Mbit DSL, for which I pay 90 US dollars a month (with a basic home phone line). That's the only Internet I can get. East Coast USA.

Is this in a smaller rural town or a home very far out? Every metropolitan area I've seen at least has near-universal cable TV/internet coverage (typically up to 50-300 Mbps), and even exurbs these days often have fiber.

Re: In India, smartphones and cheap data are giving women a voice

#28

Post by _wldu »

vinay427 wrote: post #27
_wldu wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sounds awesome. Good, affordable connectivity seems to be a basic human right. I wish it was this way everywhere. I'm in the US and can only get 1.5Mbit DSL, for which I pay 90 US dollars a month (with a basic home phone line). That's the only Internet I can get. East Coast USA.

Is this in a smaller rural town or a home very far out? Every metropolitan area I've seen at least has near-universal cable TV/internet coverage (typically up to 50-300 Mbps), and even exurbs these days often have fiber.

University town. I'm in the town limits, but on the very edge of town. Apartments downtown have fast connections, but edge neighborhoods and surrounding areas only have low speed options.

Re: In India, smartphones and cheap data are giving women a voice

#29

Post by pascalmahe »

varvar wrote: post #21
tmikaeld wrote: post #4

That's an exciting read and it's hard to grasp the sheer numbers involved here, no wonder bandwidth is troublesome at these scales. Feels like this could eventually start a liberating movement for women across the country.

Liberating women from what exactly? It all seems ridiculous myth making, considering what indians have shared here on HN about how much asymmetrical power indian women have available through the court system in India, and the sort of abuses they inflict regularly, the misuse of the assymetry for material gain etc. But yeah I get it. It's the new Democracy + Capitalism freedom making program they NEED to go through fo…

> Liberating women from what exactly?

Take your pick: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violence_against_women_in_Indi...

Re: In India, smartphones and cheap data are giving women a voice

#30

Post by pascalmahe »

Guthur wrote: post #5
tmikaeld wrote: post #4

That's an exciting read and it's hard to grasp the sheer numbers involved here, no wonder bandwidth is troublesome at these scales. Feels like this could eventually start a liberating movement for women across the country.

Don't worry, no one is ever that interested in men being happy anyway.

That's because men are not victims of a system tailored to others' needs. Women are: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_inequality_in_India
Post reply on HN