Telecommunications & Technology
In a Written reply to the Parliament, the Government has stated that the Cash reserves of the BSNL have dwindled from Rs 29335 Cr to just Rs 1214 Cr during the regime of Kapil Sibal as the Minister of Communications and IT. The reply stated is as below, THE MINISTER OF STATE IN THE MINISTRY … Read more
ZTE is still targeting to be one of the top three handset makers by 2015 and forecasts a 30% increase in smartphone sales in 2013 as it focuses on higher end smartphones to improve profitability.
ZTE launched only one high-end smartphone versus eight models a year ago.
Overall we are still relatively cautious on Indian Telecommunications given high valuations, regulatory drama and clearly the 2G auctions continue to drag on. The regulatory landscape has never been easy to call, but with every delay in 2G auctions, the risk of large license renewal payments is reducing. For the upcoming auctions scheduled in March, … Read more
Airtel’s myairtel application has been acknowledged as ‘App of the Year’ in ‘Best Application using Network APIs’ category at the prestigious Global Mobile Awards 2013 in Barcelona. myAirtel App is developed by IBM Labs India, and Powered by a robust Network API backbone and a simple front-end User Interface. The myAirtel App lets customers of … Read more
The Cabinet has recently decided that all GSM operators that hold spectrum above 4.4 MHz in any circle will have to pay a one-time fee. Notably, Airtel and Idea have excess spectrum of 73MHz and ~35MHz, for which they will have to make a payment of US$825m and US$325m, respectively. DOT had asked the operators … Read more
Airtel has deployed Ericsson’s Mobile Broadband Charging solution and has completely modernized it’s Pre-paid/ IN solution for it’s subscribers, across 23 circles in India. The solution will allow Bharti Airtel to enhance the prepaid customer experience by offering a wider & attractive range of prepaid services, flexible bundling and real time control of chargeable services. … Read more
Airtel, India’s Largest Wireless Carrier just a while ago told us that they have tested their 4G LTE network in Pune with Nokia Siemens Networks’ Circuit Switched FallBack (CSFB) voice solution using the underlying GSM Band. With CSFB, the network can transfer customers to GSM platform to make and receive voice calls and access voicemails … Read more
Telecom regulator TRAI released operator wise gross revenue data for 3Q FY13. Revenue market share for incumbent operators (including Bharti, Idea and Vodafone) increased to 67.7% in 3Q FY13 from 66.9% in 2Q FY13. Bharti and Idea gained ~50bps and ~20bps market share QoQ. RMS for Vodafone remained almost flat whereas other operators like Rcom, … Read more
The iPhone remained the favorite mobile phone brand among users, with a 21.2% “attention rate” (the percentage of search queries for a certain brand across all mobile phone-related search queries), up 1.2pp QoQ. Samsung (15.8%, up 0.2pp) overtook Nokia (14.6%, down 1.8pp) to become the second most searched-for mobile phone brand among Chinese users. Although overseas brands continued to fill the 3 most favored mobile phone brands, there were five Chinese domestic brands which managed to enter the top 10, including Xiaomi (8.5%, up 2.1pp), Lenovo (4.7%, up 0.9pp), Huawei (3.2%, up 0.3pp), ZTE (2.7%, up 0.1pp) and Meizu (2.3%, up 0.7pp).
In terms of the most popular mobile phone models, Apple took all top 3 positions with its iPhone4S (representing an 8.4% attention rate), iPhone5 (7.6%) and
HTC launched its new flagship model “One” (previously known as M7) on 19 February. Compared with ‘Butterfly’, One features a smaller size screen (4.7-inch, versus 5″), more powerful AP (1.7 GHz quad core, versus 1.5 GHz), higher resolution (468 ppi, versus 441 ppi), metallic feeling (aluminium unibody casing, versus polycarbonate), better sound quality (dual front-facing … Read more