Recent Posts

91

4G / LTE / Jio will emerge as leader

« Last post by wiredlife 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.

92

Technology / Change Bucket Storage Property Google Cloud Storage

« Last post by wiredlife 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.

93

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

« Last post by wiredlife 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

94

Technology / AWS to Google Cloud - File Transfer Performance Monitoring

« Last post by wiredlife 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.

95

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

« Last post by wiredlife 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.

96

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

« Last post by wiredlife 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.

97

Technology / Cloud Migration - Amazon Vs IBM / Oracle / Microsoft

« Last post by wiredlife on April 19, 2018, 01:21:36 PM »

Amazon has not gone far enough to acknowledge enterprises' need to make a gradual move from on-premises, data center-based IT operations to cloud-based operations.  And the company?s insistence that customers go all-in could hinder progress by giving it a reputation for being too cloud-centric with a lift and shift mentality.

Amazon's rivals, including Microsoft, IBM and Oracle, are able to resonate with customers' operations teams looking to make gradual moves to the cloud, initially through private/hybrid cloud scenarios. Amazon is already at a disadvantage compared to traditional software providers with their mature professional services organizations. The company relies heavily on partners to provide customers with support for digital transformation projects that require on-premises data center support and verticalized, specific use case solutions.

Amazon needs to lower the barriers to cloud adoption by pre-building as much functionality as it can for specific use cases to the benefit of both customers and channel partners. Otherwise it will lose out to closest cloud rivals Google and Microsoft.

98

Web 2.0 / The industrialization of digital commences at Accenture

« Last post by wiredlife on December 22, 2017, 11:04:10 AM »

Accenture management indicated commencement of industrialization of digital services and increase in size of digital projects. It will be interesting to see if clients segregate large digital projects and work with a number of niche vendors or opt for scale vendors with a track-record of delivering complex integration projects. Select Indian IT companies may benefit if the latter materializes.

While Indian IT has been a late entrant in digital, the companies have stepped up investments and gained momentum in the recent quarters. It remains to be seen whether Indian IT capitalizes on industrialization theme and if it results in growth acceleration in FY2019.

99

4G / LTE / Jio Users Consume 7x Data Volume of Airtel

« Last post by wiredlife on October 31, 2017, 02:09:46 PM »

Jio Data usage per subscriber was robust 9.6GB/month vs. 3GB/month on the top incumbent's network. Jio's data volumes on the network were ~7x Airtel's data volumes. Minutes of usage per subscriber per month were 626, 1.2x that of the top incumbents.

RJio added 15mn subscribers in the quarter ending September 2017. RJio suggested that most of the users are on the Rs399 or higher plan. Customer churn is at 1% per month, and the company expects it to diminish further. Call drop rate has been <0.4% with 100% network availability time. According to TRAI, Jio has 18Mbps download speed on the network.

With ~160mn 4G smartphones currently in the market, Jio has 85% market share there.

100

4G / LTE / Jio Increases Addressable market with feature Phone Launch

« Last post by wiredlife on October 10, 2017, 07:22:06 AM »

Reliance Jio launched its much-awaited 4G feature phone The device is priced at INR1500, collected as a fully refundable deposit, refundable at the end of three years. The phone has a 2.4" QVGA screen, bundled Jio apps and will not be compatible with non-Jio SIMs.

The company is targeting shipments of 5mn phones/week. The monthly plan for INR153 would offer unlimited voice/SMS and 0.5GB of data per day. There are two sachet plans for INR24 and INR54 with validity of two and seven days respectively. The phone can be connected to TV through a Jio Phone cable. However, this will require enrollment to the INR309/month plan (1GB/day allowance) which will allow 3-4 hours of daily video streaming.

In addition, it was also limited in addressing the lower ARPU customer who are feature phone users (installed based >500mn). We believe that the launch of 4G feature phone and investing in developing this ecosystem will increase the addressable market for R Jio significantly. The company is also planning to increase its network coverage to >95% by Mar-18 from >80% at present.