Messages

76

Cable / DSL Services / Jio to Monetize Massive Fiber / Smart Tower Network

« on: January 22, 2019, 01:06:02 PM »

Jio proposes to transfer fibre & tower assets to two separate undertakings is intended at monetising these assets and will likely follow an InvIT structure.

While too many details were not disclosed (likely to be completed in c3-6 mths), some key highlights: 1) It will lead to associated debt on Jio’s books being transferred to these entities, 2) It will help attract a new pool of capital into these passive infra assets (some investors have already evinced interest), 3) It will help Jio become a predominantly asset-light digital services company, 4) Jio will be the anchor customer for both tower & fibre assets (on a leasing model), with all future related capex to be borne by these entities, 5) The assets will be open to sharing with other telecom operators on mkt-based pricing, which could be a concern for BHIN (mgmt. clarified that sharing is possible on most of its towers, and does not view the sharing of its extensive fibre assets as a loss of competitive advantage).

77

5G / Wi-Fi / Airtel Digital Brain / Darts Platform

« on: January 22, 2019, 12:50:36 PM »

Airtel developed a Digital Brain (360 degree view of consumers), an intelligent and predictive platform helping Airtel understand each customer personally and contextually. This would help the company better engage with customers for selling its own services as well as partner services. Airtel mentions this as a ‘game changer’.

DARTS aggregates data from CRMs, billing systems, network, in-store visits, DTH, Telemedia, Wynk and My Airtel to prepare near real-time insights on consumers. It is a foundation for the revenue assurance function with several use cases like Airtel Secure, data rollover, proactive experience management, and credit line for customers.

78

FTTH Broadband / Jio Platform - Data Lake Play

« on: January 22, 2019, 12:49:32 PM »

Jio mentioned that other growth drivers are its JioPhone, upcoming FTTH and Enterprises services and digital tech platforms. It intends to enhance its digital tech. platform by entering into exclusive partnerships with content providers.

Robust user engagement will give Jio an opportunity to build the Jio Advertisement platform. In this light, we believe that Jio’s enterprise data lake – an integrated repository of massive data from internal and public sources (e.g. Social media), would be relevant, as it would give the company ability to target users with relevant advertisements.

79

Technology / China Government Supports Autonomous Vehicles / Self Driving Cars

« on: January 20, 2019, 04:37:51 PM »

Baidu has sold 100 self-driving minibuses this July which now operates in 10 locations and has carried 10,000 passengers. Chinese state-owned autos manufacturer, FAW, expects to launch the first Apollo L4 self-driving passenger car in 2019 and mass production in 2020. Baidu is also helping Changsha’s government to develop robotic taxis with expected launch in end-2019. Additionally, the company has signed a strategic contract to help Beijing and Shanghai government build smart cities.

With the government’s blessing, China could become world’s largest self-driving car market given its serious traffic problem. China Mobile is prepared to launch a nationwide 5G network in China when autonomous driving is ready.

80

Technology / The Rise and Rise of Automation Globally

« on: January 20, 2019, 03:18:32 PM »

For the Automation Indistry, demand in 2018 held up for the first half, but after the summer it was clear that growth was crumbling as
it became harder to access project financing and exporters were holding back automation projects in order to assess the trade situation.

This year US automation demand was strong in general industries, but the automotive sector was weak. We believe multiple auto projects will be restarted as the new USMCA (New Nafta) agreement brings clarity. Automation demand is likely to stay firm in the domestic market and is looking promising in Southeast Asia and India.

Technology continues to  make robotics and automation solution more efficient and powerful. IoT and data collection is penetrating the industry deeper as networks get smarter and sensors find their way into more mechanical components. We further see traceability as an emerging trend in manufacturing that will lead to improved quality and more efficient inventory control.

81

Web 2.0 / Which are Sought After Business in Internet / Digital Revoluton ?

« on: January 19, 2019, 01:23:43 PM »

We expect India ecommerce to touch USD70bn in revenue by CY20F (vs. USD28bn in CY16) driven by: 1) E-tailing growing ~3x to USD47bn, 2) online travel nearly doubling to USD21bn, and 3) digital advertising growing 3x to USD3.5bn over this period. However, the sector’s reality check with illusive profitability for most of the unlisted players should remain a continuing theme.

Classified will be the most profitable segment, where we are positive on INFOEDGE CORP (leadership in job, restaurant & real estate classifieds) and JUSTDIAL (largest local search player). In online travel, under-penetration of international air ticketing/H&P segment and normalisation of competitive activity in H&P are likely to provide a rodmap towards profitability.

82

Cable / DSL Services / India Internet User Base to Touch 850 Million by 2020

« on: January 19, 2019, 01:21:47 PM »

We believe the case for India Internet remains attractive, with: 1) a large internet user base of 500mn+ internet users in CY18 (second only to China) which we expect to touch 850 mn+ by 2020; 2) mobile remaining the driver of internet penetration driven by strong smartphone sales (136mn+ in past 12 months), falling data prices and rising 3G+4G penetration (~80% by CY21F); and 3) favourable demographics with two-thirds of the consumer base below 35 years of age, with internet becoming a mainstream channel given
choice/convenience.

83

SmartPhones & Apps / Can Jio Monetize Apps / Contents ?

« on: January 19, 2019, 01:16:10 PM »

Reliance Jio now has more than 20% market share, and it will be important to keep an eye on a few things:

    Till date, Jio's subscriber base has seen incremental increase, thanks to smaller players exiting the market. Now that the consolidation is over, will it be able to maintain that growth?
    Initially, Jio planned to offer digital content as a freebie for 90 days. It wanted to monetise later. But as of today, content is still being offered free. Can it manage to charge for content.

84

Technology / Moving Files from Different Folders in Google S3 Storage Bucket

« on: January 17, 2019, 10:37:28 AM »

Moving Files from Different Folders in Google S3 Storage Bucket

Pissed off with Amazon,  I moved all the files from AWS to Google Cloud Storage. They were in different Folders and I wanted them to consolidate in only one Bucket (i.e Bucket's root folder) and change the storage type to coldline  (coldline should be set once you know you are never going to come back to those files in the near future)

*.* is implemented as ** in Google Cloud Console
The command I used was

gsutil -m mv gs://che_aws/s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/che/mca/** gs://che_aws/

s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/che/mca/ <--- This was the folder structure on AWS.

What does MV do ?
It copies all the files to specified destination and then remove from the source folder. Even remove the empty Folders.

85

4G / LTE / Jio will emerge as leader

« on: January 12, 2019, 07:47:03 PM »

Reliance Jio Infocomm is all to emerge as the leading operator with 36% revenue market share in FY20 with market-share gains coming largely from Vodafone Idea. This in turn could ease tariff pressures in the sector. That said, in markets with highest 4G penetration (metros), Reliance Jio lost 4ppt market share over the past two quarters to 19%, mainly due to improved 4G networks and adoption of bundled plans by their subscribers. If such trends spill over to non-metro markets, then tariff pressures could remain for longer. Among incumbents, we expect Bharti Airtel to retain revenue market share at 31%, but Vodafone Idea is likely to lose market share in the wake of merger integration.

86

Technology / Change Bucket Storage Property Google Cloud Storage

« on: December 19, 2018, 12:18:14 PM »

I was only pushing some Backup Data to Google Cloud. By default the Bucket Property is set to "Multi-Regional" access with primary storage in the US. Cost for 1 TB / Month is approximately $20.

Changed the Storage Type of the Bucket to "nearline" that is sparingly accessed [Once a Month]
You have to use the command line gsutil command to do the required changes so that it applies to existing objects / files and the nes that will get created in the future.

gsutil defstorageclass set nearline gs://acn9

Read https://cloud.google.com/storage/archival/ for more information.

87

Technology / Why System Programmers Need to Know Implementation of UNIX Command Internals ?

« on: September 26, 2018, 12:35:10 PM »

19 Years ago, after graduation, while facing Systems Engineer interview, I was asked how will you implement "ls" UNIX command in your own program. I'd have to use low level system calls to find out the files, access inode info and display the list.

I often wondered then why would anybody reinvent the wheel when AT&T Bell Labs scientists have done such a wonderful job. The immediate answer I then got was to test your knowledge of system calls and usage.

However, about few months ago I've been using Google / Amazon Cloud Services. On their Shell Prompt, we can actually use UNIX commands to manipulate our bucket / objects. For example, here is a command that I executed on Google Console Shell,

**********************************************************************
$gsutil rm gs://acn/datasets/travel_food*.*


Updates are available for some Cloud SDK components.  To install them,
please run:
  $ gcloud components update

Removing gs://acn/datasets/travel_food_services_chennai_private_limited.zip...
Removing gs://acn/datasets/travel_food_services_chennai_private_limited.zip...
Removing gs://acn/datasets/travel_food_services_kolkata_private_limited.zip...
Removing gs://acn/datasets/travel_food_services_kolkata_private_limited.zip...
/ [4 objects]
==> NOTE: You are performing a sequence of gsutil operations that may
run significantly faster if you instead use gsutil -m -o ... Please
see the -m section under "gsutil help options" for further information
about when gsutil -m can be advantageous.

Removing gs://acn/datasets/travel_food_services_private_limited.zip...
/ [5 objects]
Operation completed over 5 objects.
**********************************************************************

Now we all know the architecture of Cloud. It is Virtually Infinite Storage Space handled by means of buckets. Google Engineers have implemented the usage of "rm" command and also added more options to suit to their Cloud Offering so that we can get the task done in as less cpu cycles as possible.

Thanks

88

Technology / AWS to Google Cloud - File Transfer Performance Monitoring

« on: August 28, 2018, 10:50:31 AM »

AWS Cloud on East Coast to Google Cloud Storage [US - Optimized]

1. 14.66 GB 65 Files and Time Taken is 123 Seconds =
2. 10.75 GB 68 Files and Time Taken is 759 Seconds =  [The 68 Files were written to the same bucket where other Large Files Existed]

After this Transfer, there were 266 Files with total of 42.76 GB in the bucket.

The question is, if bucket already has  say about 30GB and 200 Files, will further addition slow down the transfer ?

Other External Factors:
Transfer was carried out at the same time of the Day to rule which will somewhat take care of Traffic Pattern. Exceptions include either AWS or GCloud doing something else.

3. 17.06 GB 84 Files and Time Taken is 124 Seconds = 29/08  [The 84 Files were written to the same bucket where other Large Files Existed]
I guess the abnormal delay observed is due to the fact that AWS or GCloud doing something else when the transfer happened.

89

4G / LTE / Renewed Pricing Aggression from Jio on Airtel / Vodafone

« on: May 23, 2018, 02:19:27 PM »

The direct and effective (through data allowance increase) fresh price cuts in the smartphone segment announced on Jan 9, 2018 and (2) the new `49 (28 days, unlimited voice, 1 GB data) plan announced for Jio Phone on Jan 26, 2018. Jio indicated that this price cut was a response to the incumbents? attempts to close the pricing gap versus Jio and termed it a clear signal of intent to the incumbents.

Cut in international termination rate (ITR) effective Feb 1, 2018: TRAI?s decision to cut ITR to 30 paise/min from 53 paise/min became effective Feb 1, 2018. Idea and Bharti indicated that this impacted revenues by around 1-1.5% for the quarter. We do note that this revenue loss for the incumbents did not benefit the Indian consumer or the exchequer.

As discussed above, ARPU bottom may still be some time away. This would keep the incumbents? P&L?s under pressure even as the need to invest in networks remains high. We do expect Bharti to emerge fine in most plausible scenarios and remain positive on the stock.

90

4G / LTE / Airtel's Sunil Mittal Poor Math helping Jio Gain Subscribers

« on: April 19, 2018, 03:07:19 PM »

Early this year, Jio (not covered) had come up with new plans which effectively decreased tariffs to a new low, reversing its own earlier trend of increasing tariffs. The down-trading of tariffs is likely to be more negative for incumbents compared to Jio itself. Reasons are twofold. First, Jio has been increasing customers at a rate of c7-8m per month; against this, incumbents are increasing subscribers at a rate of c1-1.5m. As such impact of lower ARPU may see some offset because of higher growth in subs for Jio but this may not be the case for incumbents. Other than that, Jio collects INR99 as a prime membership fees from its new subscribers and this may limit ARPU downside for Jio this quarter.