Recent Posts

41

3G / HSPA / EVDO / Supreme Court - A Strict Teacher for Telcos

« Last post by wiredlife on July 21, 2020, 05:33:52 PM »

After asking telcos to make reasonable upfront payment and come up with a roadmap for AGR repayments in its last hearing, the SC has noted that a repayment timeline of 20 years is a very long period. SC has asked telcos to come up with a reasonable time period. For the timelines, TTSL has sought 7-10 years repayment while Bharti / VIL have sought 15 years (VIL initially requested for 20 years and later reduced the time frame). However, the government has maintained its stance for a 20-year repayment period as telcos could go bankrupt in case of an extension failure.

Furthermore, the SC has asked VIL(Vodafone Idea) to secure AGR dues payable. To this, VIL responded saying that the government could retain its INR80b GST dues w.r.t. to the AGR dues and mentioned that it has no assets except spectrum. The government has maintained that it considers spectrum as security and could auction it to secure dues, in case of payment default. In terms of amount, the SC has reiterated that there is no scope of reassessment of AGR dues and the amount calculated by the DoT would be considered as final.

The SC also raised questions on the Rs400bn dues from insolvent telcos (Reliance communications, Aircel, Tata DoCoMo, etc) and said that it would go into the bona fide of these companies to ensure that IBC is not misused to avoid government dues.

Moreover, in maintaining its harsh stance, the SC has mentioned that any proceedings to re-assess the amount would be in violation of the court and could result in contempt proceedings against the entities involved.

42

Web 2.0 / JioMart to compete Flipkart / Amazon / Big Basket Every Online Retailer

« Last post by wiredlife on July 16, 2020, 06:42:26 PM »

Mukesh Ambani is planning to accelerate rollout of JioMart given encouraging progress on pilot programs of grocery model with kirana partners and beta version of online platform with consumers across 200 cities.

JioMart is already clocking over 0.25 mn orders/day, comparable to 0.2-0.3 mn orders serviced by BigBasket and Grofers on a daily basis. JioMart is now focusing on increasing its geographical reach, enhancing its delivery capabilities and customer experience and expanding to other product categories including electronics, fashion, pharmaceuticals and healthcare in the near term.

Reliance has also indicated that it has received interest from strategic and financial investors in Reliance Retail, who they plan to induct in next few quarters

43

Cable / DSL Services / How Verizon Leveraged Femtocell to Handle Poor Cellular Networks ?

« Last post by wiredlife on July 13, 2020, 07:17:33 PM »

Poor Cellular Reception was one of the most common problems in the US prior to 2016. Verizon Wireless came up with the novel idea of FemtoCell

The FemtoCell device acts as a Mobile Network Operator / Cellular Service Provider's Mini Base Station and it connects to the Service Provider's Exchange using the customer's DSL / Cable Broadband Connection.

Thus this could solve the last mile wireless signal reception problems in Homes and SOHO where each FemtoCell could service 8 wireless devices.

NOTE: I keep forgetting what this technology is, hence this post is a note to self.

44

FTTH Broadband / Who Owns Data in the Digital Economy ?

« Last post by wiredlife on July 08, 2020, 04:20:28 PM »

An area potentially of great interest to investors is data collection and sharing, which is at the heart of the digital economy.

As part of the government’s effort to build up the digital infrastructure, it’s possible that, as suggested by some industry experts, it may try to lead a data base which encompasses data from various government bodies (e.g., the central bank, the two main financial industry regulators, the Administration of Industry and Commerce, the tax department, Customs and the Court) and leading industry players, i.e., an enlarged version of the “social credit score” system that the government has set up.

In addition, by granting all players access to segments of the data base, the government could help develop the digital economy.  From this perspective, it’s similar to the government’s moves in the past to centralize the telecom network and the gas trunk pipeline network.

Leveling the play field in data access could be a great boon to new entrants and smaller players but negative to the existing leading players that currently enjoy a big data advantage, depending on how access to such a data base is regulated and priced.

45

Web 2.0 / Top 3 Tech Trends for Next Decade

« Last post by wiredlife on July 08, 2020, 02:52:39 PM »

Splinternet: China to overtake the US and become the world leader in AI by 2030. Sovereign internets expand. Winners: emerging markets/the East; Losers: developed markets/the West.

Robots & Automation: up to 50% of jobs at risk of automation by 2035. Winners: automation, local production, big data & AI; Losers: humans, global supply chains.

Smart Everything: 500bn connectable devices by 2030 to combat deflationary demographics but at the risk of the death of privacy. Winners: IoT, connectivity, smart cities, ‘big brother tech’; Losers: privacy, offline.

At the same time, we expect unprecedented strides in innovation and “techceleration”. By 2030, global data knowledge will likely be 32x greater than today's level. By the mid- 2020s, we will interact with an online device every 18 seconds, vs. 6.5 minutes today; and there will likely be 500bn connectable devices globally by 2030. Techceleration will unlock economic value, but will challenge governments, privacy and society like never before (source: IBM).

46

SmartPhones & Apps / Unique Smart Phone Users Reach 450 Million

« Last post by wiredlife on July 06, 2020, 07:49:33 PM »

At the end of June-2020, India has 450m unique smartphone users. Though most industry reports (Nokia MBiTs Index, IDC tracker, etc.) provide handset shipment data, it is rare to find the data on the installed base.  There are over 100m JIO Phone users; in line with our estimate of 100m.

VOOT has 100m MAUs compared with 300m+ for market leader Hotstar.

JIO is setting up two data centres ? in Gujarat and Maharashtra, which will be operational by end-2020. This will house the enterprise cloud, which will run Microsoft Azure.

JIOGenNext, an incubator, supports 136 start-ups. Of these, 32 are in the fin-tech space. The others are in enterprise solutions, retail,
edtech, digital consumer services, media, IoT, agritech, health, logistics, network, social media and drones.

47

4G / LTE / Jio Platforms Stake Sale to PE Investors

« Last post by wiredlife on July 06, 2020, 07:41:49 PM »

Please find attached Data on Historical Private Equity Investments that has Flowed into Jio Platforms Ltd

Private Equity Facebook          Silver Lake Partners Tranche 1 Vista Equity Partners    General Atlantic       KKR          Mubadala          Silver Lake Partners Tranche 2 Abu   Dhabi Investment Authority TPG          L Catterton       PIF          Intel Capital       Google Total

Investment (INR Bn) 436 57 114 66 114 91 45 57 45 19 114 19 337.4 1520

Jio Platforms Stake 9.99% 1.15% 2.32% 1.34% 2.32% 1.85% 0.93% 1.16% 0.93% 0.39% 2.32% 0.39% 7.73% 32.97%

Last Update 16-July-2020

48

3G / HSPA / EVDO / Equal price hikes, unequal revenue delta

« Last post by wiredlife on July 06, 2020, 07:16:22 PM »

We are a little intrigued with the unequal revenue uplift across the top three telecom operators in India.

Vodafone Idea's weak print can be explained by the company continuing to lose subscribers, especially at the low end. VIL’s subscriber mix within the mid/high-end segments also seems to be deteriorating. What is particularly intriguing is that Jio's qoq revenue growth was similar to VIL’s and substantially below Airtel.

Jio's off-net traffic mix moved significantly in favor of incoming after the company’s move to charge explicitly for offnet-outgoing calls starting Oct 2019; this move would have yielded a significant jump in termination revenues for R-Jio (versus 2Q levels), in our view. Note that we are ignoring the revenue uplift on account of the explicit charging of offnet-outgoing calls itself. If we were to include this, the math would be even tougher to understand.

Smartphone LTE subs for Jio were perhaps flattish, 4Q over 2Q, or may have even declined. We note that Bharti added 33.2 mn smartphone LTE subs during this timeframe.

49

Cable / DSL Services / Wired Broadband is just 6% in India

« Last post by wiredlife on July 02, 2020, 01:38:49 PM »

A shift in consumer behaviour is underway in the wake of the lockdown and social distancing, which is leading to higher dependency on digital tools such as videoconferencing, collaborative applications, thereby driving up demand for telecom services.

Household penetration of home broadband in India is about 6% (as of 2019), vs. >50% for most developed markets and mainland China. We believe there could be an accelerated adoption of home broadband in India. In light of recent Covid-19 pandemic concerns, a significant portion of population is working from home. This change would help improve revenues owing to: a) higher data usage, b) faster adoption of home broadband, and c) subscribers upgrading to bigger data and telecom packs.

Adding to the Telcos benefit is the Online Classroom which is forcing Parents to get a Wired Broadband at Home for Children's Education which is the number one priority for most Indians.

50

5G / Wi-Fi / 5G Deployment to Accelerate

« Last post by dslindia on July 01, 2020, 08:34:04 AM »

The telecom segment can grow from increased adoption of new technologies such as IoT, AR, VR, etc. Covid-19 impact has been positive for the ISV segment due to increased usage of online platforms and collaboration tools.

Investments in futuristic technologies such as autonomous vehicles can drop. Expect spending on 5G to increase since 5G applications have use cases across verticals in the new normal.

Companies like HCL Technologies invested early and has set up center of excellences (CoEs) for several of these technologies. For example, the company has set up CoE for 5G in Milan where it has access to high-end skills not available in India. These investments help the company develop solutions around new technologies that can be offered to clients when the technologies reach mainstream adoption.