Reliance’s Ambani Lays Out Plan for Low-Cost Mobile Data in India • Hacker News Board

Re: Reliance’s Ambani Lays Out Plan for Low-Cost Mobile Data in India

#11

Post by shubhamjain » Thu, Sep 01, 2016, 3:50 PM UTC

0xmohit wrote: post #7

ap46 wrote: post #3

Kinda like Valentine from Kingsman. I'm a bit apprehensive of their executive saying deep packet inspectionn will be the actual gold mine [ http://qz.com/771690/reliance-jio-bombshell-the-good-the-bad... ]

Quoting: Privacy: An unnamed Jio executive mentioned “deep packet inspection” to Reuters, saying: “It’s called deep packet inspection, and what you can do with the analytics of that is mind-boggling,” he said, referring to a practice that digs into “packets” of data created by computers for efficiency, mining them for information. If this is happening and Jio is accessing data packets to develop patterns of user data…

I am not sure if "Big Data" is an accurate idea that fits Reliance's intentions to kick-start this. Surely, it sounds like a perfect recipe — onboard millions of customers and sell their 'data' — but on a secondary inspection it doesn't seems to be a smart idea.

Can you even imagine the scale needed to process this kind of data? That's petabytes (rough estimate), every day. Maybe, it's theoretically possible but any investment in this kind of technology would be enormous.

Browsing behaviour data maybe valuable but to what scale? Even a big advertising firm would balk at spending any big bucks for this and remember, the scale needed to mine any information out of this. How much valuable business insights can this generate that wasn't possible in the past?

Maybe I am wrong but I'd be very skeptical if selling is their master plan.

Re: Reliance’s Ambani Lays Out Plan for Low-Cost Mobile Data in India

#12

Post by vinay427 » Thu, Sep 01, 2016, 3:51 PM UTC

grecy wrote: post #8

andy_ppp wrote: post #5

I watched a premier league game via star sports on 3G on a train from Mumbai to Goa once. Seemed better than the 3G in London...

I'm in West Africa now. The 3G here is much faster than in Canada. Cheaper too.

To be fair, nearly every country seems to be cheaper than Canada for mobile service.

Re: Reliance’s Ambani Lays Out Plan for Low-Cost Mobile Data in India

#13

Post by witty_username » Thu, Sep 01, 2016, 3:54 PM UTC

abverma wrote: post #10

I've been using the network (Jio) for about a month now. The service is great, but the paranoid in me is genuinely worried about Jio ending up having a Verizon-NSA like partnership with the Indian Govt. (they probably already have). No one will dare question it because we have idiots for politicians and we are nowhere close to having a privacy law for our citizens. Is VPN, Whonix, Tor (in essence compartmentalization…

HTTPS will allow them to only see the domain. Tor stops the domain from being revealed to them.

Re: Reliance’s Ambani Lays Out Plan for Low-Cost Mobile Data in India

#14

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Sep 01, 2016, 3:55 PM UTC

shubhamjain wrote: post #11

0xmohit wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoting: Privacy: An unnamed Jio executive mentioned “deep packet inspection” to Reuters, saying: “It’s called deep packet inspection, and what you can do with the analytics of that is mind-boggling,” he said, referring to a practice that digs into “packets” of data created by computers for efficiency, mining them for information. If this is happening and Jio is accessing data packets to develop patterns of user data…

I am not sure if "Big Data" is an accurate idea that fits Reliance's intentions to kick-start this. Surely, it sounds like a perfect recipe — onboard millions of customers and sell their 'data' — but on a secondary inspection it doesn't seems to be a smart idea. Can you even imagine the scale needed to process this kind of data? That's petabytes (rough estimate), every day. Maybe, it's theoretically possible but any…

[deleted]

Re: Reliance’s Ambani Lays Out Plan for Low-Cost Mobile Data in India

#15

Post by vthallam » Thu, Sep 01, 2016, 4:01 PM UTC

shubhamjain wrote: post #11

0xmohit wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoting: Privacy: An unnamed Jio executive mentioned “deep packet inspection” to Reuters, saying: “It’s called deep packet inspection, and what you can do with the analytics of that is mind-boggling,” he said, referring to a practice that digs into “packets” of data created by computers for efficiency, mining them for information. If this is happening and Jio is accessing data packets to develop patterns of user data…

I am not sure if "Big Data" is an accurate idea that fits Reliance's intentions to kick-start this. Surely, it sounds like a perfect recipe — onboard millions of customers and sell their 'data' — but on a secondary inspection it doesn't seems to be a smart idea. Can you even imagine the scale needed to process this kind of data? That's petabytes (rough estimate), every day. Maybe, it's theoretically possible but any…

Scale is not at all a problem here, but i am not sure how they plan to pull this off considering so many privacy violations.

Also, may be some people in India won't mind accepting this if Reliance gives LTE internet at very low cost, others might not just use it i guess.

Re: Reliance’s Ambani Lays Out Plan for Low-Cost Mobile Data in India

#16

Post by jayadevan » Thu, Sep 01, 2016, 4:22 PM UTC

This is huge. Quoting from a piece linked below.

"Now, here’s my not-so-big bet: Jio will not make its magic number of 100 million customers in one year. The person who offers me the best odds before end of Saturday on a $200 bottle of a single malt is on.

In fact, more from my smoky mirror: Jio will struggle for at least a few years before it starts making a dent in the telecom market." http://goo.gl/hH7Fai

Re: Reliance’s Ambani Lays Out Plan for Low-Cost Mobile Data in India

#17

Post by zxv » Thu, Sep 01, 2016, 4:28 PM UTC

This should be a concern in the US as well. AT&T Uverse is said to be doing deep packet inspection on all unencrypted traffic unless subscribers pay an additional ~$744/year to opt-out.

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/03/atts-p...

This should be a concern because such data on individual subscribers would be available to law enforcement and become a potential mechanism for highly detailed mass surveillance.

Re: Reliance’s Ambani Lays Out Plan for Low-Cost Mobile Data in India

#18

Post by geodel » Thu, Sep 01, 2016, 4:36 PM UTC

eklavya wrote: post #9

ap46 wrote: post #3

Kinda like Valentine from Kingsman. I'm a bit apprehensive of their executive saying deep packet inspectionn will be the actual gold mine [ http://qz.com/771690/reliance-jio-bombshell-the-good-the-bad... ]

I am reasonably sure that all other telecoms are doing this already. Attitude towards privacy of an average Indian leans towards "don't care". We seem to think privacy in numbers or something.

Well if huge number of people are living in or very close to poverty I do not think data privacy is very high on their priority.

Re: Reliance’s Ambani Lays Out Plan for Low-Cost Mobile Data in India

#19

Post by Manishearth » Thu, Sep 01, 2016, 4:52 PM UTC

witty_username wrote: post #13

abverma wrote: post #10

I've been using the network (Jio) for about a month now. The service is great, but the paranoid in me is genuinely worried about Jio ending up having a Verizon-NSA like partnership with the Indian Govt. (they probably already have). No one will dare question it because we have idiots for politicians and we are nowhere close to having a privacy law for our citizens. Is VPN, Whonix, Tor (in essence compartmentalization…

HTTPS will allow them to only see the domain. Tor stops the domain from being revealed to them.

Pushing for the entire internet to use https is hard. Pushing for ISPs to be barred from reading http pages is easier.

My (Indian) landline ISP even writes to http pages, injecting ads for higher tier internet plans and letting me know that I've reached my data cap (after which I still have internet, but at a reduced speed).

Tor is good, but slow, and many websites block it or show captchas.

Re: Reliance’s Ambani Lays Out Plan for Low-Cost Mobile Data in India

#20

Post by cjbenedikt » Thu, Sep 01, 2016, 4:52 PM UTC

shubhamjain wrote: post #11

0xmohit wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoting: Privacy: An unnamed Jio executive mentioned “deep packet inspection” to Reuters, saying: “It’s called deep packet inspection, and what you can do with the analytics of that is mind-boggling,” he said, referring to a practice that digs into “packets” of data created by computers for efficiency, mining them for information. If this is happening and Jio is accessing data packets to develop patterns of user data…

I am not sure if "Big Data" is an accurate idea that fits Reliance's intentions to kick-start this. Surely, it sounds like a perfect recipe — onboard millions of customers and sell their 'data' — but on a secondary inspection it doesn't seems to be a smart idea. Can you even imagine the scale needed to process this kind of data? That's petabytes (rough estimate), every day. Maybe, it's theoretically possible but any…

This may well work though: http://time.com/4471451/cathy-oneil-math-destruction/