Telecommunications & Technology
The 3G roaming controversy is currently in court, with operators having brought in a stay order on the government’s notices for penalties. The government’s contention is that the 3G network sharing arrangements are illegal and need to be stopped, while operators argue that this was explicitly allowed by the government prior to the auctions in … Read more
In order to allow various agencies to use UID as a verification of identity, the UIDAI has created an online authentication system. UIDAI has partnered with RBI, National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), and the banks, to develop two key platforms to ensure Aadhaar authenticated payments. Aadhaar Payments Bridge This system facilitates seamless transfer of … Read more
Reliance Communications has acknowledged that it is in talks with Reliance Jio Infocomm to rent or lease towers from RCOM for the latter’s rollout of its 4G TD-LTE network. RCOM has a portfolio of around 55,000 towers with no external tenancy. It will be an impossible task for Reliance Jio Infocomm to rollout a Nationwide … Read more
Reliance Communications unveiled its new business strategy for the new Financial Year 2013-14. RCom will focus on gaining incremental market share, optimizing its network, improving customer experience – particularly for data customers, optimizing cost structure, and improving branding. Management thinks that pricing power is back with larger telcos as smaller telcos are struggling given rising … Read more
Airtel and Idea have reported average sequential growth of 20-25% in data volumes in the last two quarters, and the average contribution of non-voice to wireless revenues was 16%. Of this, wireless data (2G/3G data) accounted for close to 6% of revenues. We believe that this will continue to increase as the take-up of 3G … Read more
Indian telcos have the lowest amount of spectrum allocations among Asian peers – on a relative and absolute basis. In terms of subscribers per MHz metrics, Indian telcos are at 11-15mn vs. 3-5mn for the Chinese and 1-2mn for the Indonesian telcos. For this metric, we adjust subscriber numbers for multi SIM phenomena. Average spectrum … Read more
The RIM Management provided several incremental updates following the February / March launch and subsequent global rollout of BB10, including 1mn units of BB10 sell-in in the first month of availability. BB10 has received technical acceptance at 223 carriers and has launched on 60 carriers across 40 countries, with 30 more countries forthcoming. 55% of … Read more