India from Net Neutrality to Net Equality !
Telecom has been the victim of many issues since it was intercepted. Scams, cartels, price wars, additional offers, tough regulators, quantified use of telecom funds and businesses that were built on telecom services OTT and e-commerce.
Billions of funds get poured in telecom sector every year. Last years auction itself raised more than Rs 150,000 lakh crore from bidders to provide services to retail consumers across different bandwidths.
telecom companies in order to run business have to invest a lot on different activities like auction, deployment, technology, sales and marketing, branding, fixed costs of maintaining services levels, maintenance of the optical fibres, support systems and what not only to create a handful of revenue streams generated through voice calls, internet services, subscription services, VAS - Value Added Services etc.
Telecom as an industry has seen less than 25 companies competing in the country for a billion population with heavy capital and low margins.
Sunil Bharti Mittal chairman of the Bharti Airtel was of the opinion that telecom companies make billions of investments in creating the infrastructure and OTT players like Whatsapp, Facebook and YouTube and others take the benefit with having less investment than that of telecom players and should be regulated and interconnected to share revenues with telecom companies supported by Martin Peters of Vodafone.
With that comment Airtel Zero, a zero discrimination platform where app companies sign a contract to provide services for free (no content is discriminated and part expenses are borne by the telecom companies and which would colonize the content services bundled in groups) on the sidelines of Facebook's Internet.org launched in partnership with Reliance Communications in 2015 making data free to provide basic access to 38 websites and Bing as a search engine. Internet.org's vision was to provide free data bring in next millions of Indian's online to which Airtel chief replied back urging TRAI to make spectrum free and remove all the regulatory barriers.
Airtel Zero received negative responses from users and got a 1-star rating on the play store platform and it was removed within hours of launch directed by TRAI as it is against net neutrality to provide basic services for free.
Many activists protested in favor of net neutrality and unfair trade practices against its users.
Indian Telecom industry which was set up in the 20th century was being governed by rules of the 17th century until 2016.
DoT, TRAI was directed by Telecom Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad to create rules concerned to net neutrality and present a draft consultation paper and submitted a proposal in May 2016.
Reliance Jio's entry into the telecom took the industry by storm which started providing superior 4g services at deeply discounted prices.
At a time when 1 GB of 4G data was being available at Rs 400, Jio was providing it for less than Rs 100 technically even free for a quarter.
In a span of 2 years, Jio became no. 2 telecom player with more than 308 million subscribers eliminating more than 80% of the competition.
Jio learned from the launches and failures of Uninor and TATA Docomo which failed drastically and seen a slow-paced insignificant growth over their lifetime.
In order to gain subscribers only way was to provide cheap data as it believed data is the new oil.
From a situation which was more concerned with revenues from a company perspective the situation now is providing better services to retain back customers with superior data speeds, cheap packs, and content creation.
Jio had not only given internet access to the next 500 million people online but broke many records in the world becoming the first company to gain 130 million subscribers within 1 year of launch, providing cheap data prices, fastest data speeds, among top 10 countries to consume data, adoption of advanced technology at scale, increasing the connected population to 867 million subscribers in total.
Although the situation seems to be in favor of consumers economies of scale have never been to grant benefits for the long term.
Billions of funds get poured in telecom sector every year. Last years auction itself raised more than Rs 150,000 lakh crore from bidders to provide services to retail consumers across different bandwidths.
telecom companies in order to run business have to invest a lot on different activities like auction, deployment, technology, sales and marketing, branding, fixed costs of maintaining services levels, maintenance of the optical fibres, support systems and what not only to create a handful of revenue streams generated through voice calls, internet services, subscription services, VAS - Value Added Services etc.
Telecom as an industry has seen less than 25 companies competing in the country for a billion population with heavy capital and low margins.
Sunil Bharti Mittal chairman of the Bharti Airtel was of the opinion that telecom companies make billions of investments in creating the infrastructure and OTT players like Whatsapp, Facebook and YouTube and others take the benefit with having less investment than that of telecom players and should be regulated and interconnected to share revenues with telecom companies supported by Martin Peters of Vodafone.
With that comment Airtel Zero, a zero discrimination platform where app companies sign a contract to provide services for free (no content is discriminated and part expenses are borne by the telecom companies and which would colonize the content services bundled in groups) on the sidelines of Facebook's Internet.org launched in partnership with Reliance Communications in 2015 making data free to provide basic access to 38 websites and Bing as a search engine. Internet.org's vision was to provide free data bring in next millions of Indian's online to which Airtel chief replied back urging TRAI to make spectrum free and remove all the regulatory barriers.
Airtel Zero received negative responses from users and got a 1-star rating on the play store platform and it was removed within hours of launch directed by TRAI as it is against net neutrality to provide basic services for free.
Many activists protested in favor of net neutrality and unfair trade practices against its users.
Indian Telecom industry which was set up in the 20th century was being governed by rules of the 17th century until 2016.
DoT, TRAI was directed by Telecom Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad to create rules concerned to net neutrality and present a draft consultation paper and submitted a proposal in May 2016.
Reliance Jio's entry into the telecom took the industry by storm which started providing superior 4g services at deeply discounted prices.
At a time when 1 GB of 4G data was being available at Rs 400, Jio was providing it for less than Rs 100 technically even free for a quarter.
In a span of 2 years, Jio became no. 2 telecom player with more than 308 million subscribers eliminating more than 80% of the competition.
Jio learned from the launches and failures of Uninor and TATA Docomo which failed drastically and seen a slow-paced insignificant growth over their lifetime.
In order to gain subscribers only way was to provide cheap data as it believed data is the new oil.
From a situation which was more concerned with revenues from a company perspective the situation now is providing better services to retain back customers with superior data speeds, cheap packs, and content creation.
Jio had not only given internet access to the next 500 million people online but broke many records in the world becoming the first company to gain 130 million subscribers within 1 year of launch, providing cheap data prices, fastest data speeds, among top 10 countries to consume data, adoption of advanced technology at scale, increasing the connected population to 867 million subscribers in total.
Although the situation seems to be in favor of consumers economies of scale have never been to grant benefits for the long term.
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