India Telecom
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Flag Telecom, a company owned by India’s ADA Group that also owns Reliance Communications, said it has signed a contract with T-Com, Deutsche Telekom AG’s broadband and fixed line business, to provide 180 gigabits of additional broadband connectivity between Europe and the U.S.
The additional capacity will enable Deutsche Telekom to enhance scalability and reliability of service to its customers. Demand for voice, data, and Internet between these the U.S. and Europe has been growing rapidly and the total used capacity on the. route has grown at around 48% year-on-year between 2002 and 2006, the company said in a press release. Demand is expected to grow at a higher or similar rate in the coming years.
“We have worked closely with Deutsche Telekom to understand their needs, while designing this flexible, scalable and high quality solution. The solution exacting to Deutsche Telekom’s customer service offers them excellent value for money,” said Gary Adey, Flag Telecom’s Vice President Europe.
Written by Om Malik on August 8th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on Uncategorized and Wired and India Telecom.
Bangalore, often viewed as the hub of India’s Silicon Valley, is looking to join a growing list of cities with wireless broadband everywhere, according to news reports.
The Indian Institute of Information Technology in the southern Indian city has been studying the project for the last six months and has short-listed five companies for the project. The service is supposed to be within two years, though no one is offering any details on how it will get done. Karnataka state, of which Bangalore is the capital, would not be bearing any of the cost of the project, a state government official said.
“The companies will have their own revenue model. It (the venture) will be something which will be platform neutral,” Anup K Pujari, Karnataka’s principal secretary, information technology told Indiatimes.com. He said the idea is to provide broadband Internet access for a customer on the move, irrespective of the telecom service provider the customer uses, with the service provider charging for interconnection. “(The) Expectation is that consumer will pay less than what he is paying today (for wired internet broadband access),” Mr. Pujari said.
Written by Shailaja Neelakantan on August 7th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on Wireless Broadband and India Telecom.
Qualcomm is not having a good time in India lately. First there was the whole furor over its talks with Indian CDMA mobile operator Reliance Communications breaking down as it refused to lower royalty charges. Then Reliance Communications, which operates India’s second-largest private mobile service, said it would focus on enhancing GSM services, which analysts see as a not so subtle threat to Qualcomm. Now, India’s tax department has sent the Indian unit of Qualcomm a notice seeking details on royalty collection in India, The Hindu Business Line newspaper reports.
The department has also approached Reliance and Tata Teleservices, both major clients of Qualcomm. According to local tax rules, if the patent holder has an office in India it must pay a certain percentage as service tax on royalties collected, the newspaper reports. If the patent holder is a foreign company with no office in India, the recipient Indian company, that is the user, has to pay service tax on royalty paid. “The financial statements of these companies have not shown any separate allocations for royalties paid to the US-based company,” a tax official told the newspaper.
If royalty is collected on the basis of Intellectual Property Rights, Qualcomm, which has offices in India, will have to pay 12.24 per cent on every invoice, a senior service tax consultant at Ernst and Young told the newspaper. “But if royalty is collected on the basis of a technical transfer agreement, the company will have to pay only about 5 per cent on every invoice,” the consultant said.
But a Qualcomm corporate communications official told the newspaper via email that only handset device makers, not operators, have to pay “associated royalty” to Qualcomm. “Average royalty paid on devices sold in India over the past 12 months is around 15 per cent lower than royalties that have been paid to Qualcomm in markets like Korea, Japan and the US,” the email said, adding that India accounts for only about 2.2 percent of our handset royalties.
Written by Shailaja Neelakantan on August 5th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on Unwired and India Telecom and qualcomm.
Intel plans to start WiMax trials in the next few months in several cities across India including in Mumbai, Delhi, Bangalore and Pune, the Daily News & Analysis reports. “We are also having a dozen trial discussions for the implementation of WiMax networks in India,” Ramamurthy Sivakumar, Intel’s Managing Director for South Asia, told the newspaper.
According to a report by research firms Maravedis and Tonse Telecom India will have 13 million WiMAX subscribers by 2012. “More than 70 per cent of Indian households do not have access to fixed wired telephone services,” said Adlane Fellah, senior analyst, Maravedis in a press release late June. “Instead, customers have flocked to cellular phone carriers, which have built a tremendous infrastructure to provide service to more than 10 crore (100 million) customers.” (Press Release PDF)
French technology major Alcatel has already set up a research and development center in the southern Indian state of Chennai to develop Wi-Max technology
But a disagreement between India’s CDMA and GSM operators may lead to delays in the launch of Wi-Max in the country, The Hindu Business Line reported late last month. The CDMA camp has mooted allocation of spectrum in the 2.5 Ghz band for Wi-Max services but the GSM camp has opposed the move.
In their response to a consultation paper on 3G and Wi-Max services put out by India’s telecom regulator, CDMA operators including Reliance Communication said that the 2.5-2.69 Ghz band should be allocated for Wi-Max services so that more numbers of operators can offer services. (The Government is banking on Wi-Max for broadband penetration.)
The GSM operators however say that 2.5-2.69 Ghz band should not be used for Wi-Max but should be left for third generation technology such as WCDMA. Interestingly, the CDMA Development Group, the international body promoting CDMA technology, has subscribed to India’s GSM operators’ views, says the newspaper.
Intel and Alcatel, which are investing heavily in developing Wi-Max technology, support the CDMA operators’ views. Equipment vendors like Nokia and Ericsson, which have a very strong 3G-technology portfolio, support the GSM operators’ views.
Written by Shailaja Neelakantan on August 5th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on WiMAX and Wireless Broadband and India Telecom.
Green Wi-Fi, a non-profit organization that aims to bring Internet access to schools in developing countries via cheap, solar-powered Wi-Fi networks, plans to start its first full-scale pilot project in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh at the end of the summer, reports News.com. Green Wi-Fi will be doing the India project for a Canadian aid organization that has asked for Wi-Fi in three schools in the northern Indian state where electricity is unreliable. One of these schools has a cable connection.
The concept behind Green Wi-Fi’s technology is to have a battery-powered router — charged by a solar panel — in each node in its Wi-Fi network. The nodes are mounted on rooftops and the network’s Wi-Fi signals are transferred over a grid using a wireless network standard known as 802.11b/g.
The company has received seed money from Nicholas Negroponte’s One Laptop Per Child Initiative (OLPC) that, interestingly, was recently rejected by the Indian government for being “pedagogically suspect.” According to Kaumudi, an Indian newspaper, the country’s education secretary Sudeep Banerjee said that giving schoolchildren a laptop each could harm their creative thinking and analytical abilities.
Green Wi-Fi doesn’t seem to have heard this particular take on the OLPC initiative. “We’ve heard that the strongest criticism they (OLPC) get when they evangelize their laptop is ‘What do you do about the network?’ If you have a computer but no Internet, you can play games and do spreadsheets, but accessing the world’s information is really where the value is,” co-founder Marc Pomerlau told News.com. We wonder what Banerjee will say about schoolchildren being given Internet access.
Written by Shailaja Neelakantan on August 4th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on WiFi and Wireless Broadband and India Telecom.
India’s state-run telecommunications company Mahanagar Telephone Nigam Ltd (MTNL) plans to sign commercial arrangements with broadcasters like STAR TV, Zee TV and Sony Entertainment, among others, for its Internet Protocol TV (IPTV) services, reports The Financial Express newspaper.
‘Tri-Band,’ MTNL’s IPTV service that is currently undergoing trials in parts of Delhi and Mumbai is expected to target 200,000 broadband subscribers when it formally launches in the two cities. Bharti Enterprises, India’s largest private mobile services company, is also conducting IPTV trials in Gurgaon, a suburb of Delhi, with test signals from STAR Plus, ESPN and Zee TV, sources told the newspaper.
“We have given our signals to MTNL and Bharti for testing IPTV,” a STAR TV official said. “In Chandigarh, we are even offering `Triple Play’,” the official added, referring to a bundled offering of voice, video and data.
There are currently no regulations in place for IPTV services in India. “The commercial launch of IPTV will be possible as soon as regulations regarding content, program code and other governing guidelines are getting in place,” a senior official at the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India told the newspaper.
Written by Shailaja Neelakantan on August 1st, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on IPTV and India Telecom.
The ‘Broadband in the Sky’ concept is finding its way to India. Early next year, passengers aboard planes of several Indian carriers will be able to access the Internet to surf, chat and watch television on a broadband connection, reports The Financial Express.
India’s private carriers including Kingfisher Airlines, a JetBlue clone; and other fast growing carriers such as Jet Airways and Air Sahara, plans to provide Internet connectivity at 35,000 feet. The state-owned carriers Air India and Indian Airlines are going to offer these services.
“We plan to offer Connexion, Boeing’s real-time, high-speed Internet and data communications service,” said Jitender Bhargava, Air India’s Executive Director. Kingfisher Airlines has announced plans to have live television on its flights by next March. Its fleet of Airbus A320s will be fitted with a satellite dish and live television will be available at every seat.
That’s good news for Connexion, which the WSJ has reported has done poorly, and could have cost Boeing as much as a $1 billion. But one problem is that U.S. carriers reportedly didn’t show as much interest as Boeing expected, and the new Indian customers might not be enough to keep Connexion within Boeing’s longterm plans.
In India it’s a different story. India is currently going through an aviation boom, much like the one we say in the late 1950s and 1960s in the US. According to the Centre for Asia Pacific Aviation, domestic market in India will add five million passengers every year for the next five years, with the overall market ballooning to about 45 million passengers by 2010.
It is certainly a large enough market. It is ironic that these moves are coming at a time when the entire nation is starved for bandwidth. It is causing enough concern that even the slow moving Department of Telecommunications is thinking about cutting bandwidth prices by 30-to-40%.
The telecom regulator recently informed the department that bandwidth prices in India were high because the country didn’t allow equal access at cable landing stations for new companies.
DoT is mulling over plans to open landing stations of international long distance companies to rival providers’ submarine cables and regulate access charges for the cables, The Financial Express reports. This would boost new entrants’ business and could lead to a 30-40 percent cut in bandwidth costs.
Written by Shailaja Neelakantan on July 31st, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on Wireless Broadband and India Telecom.
To cash in on the country’s nascent but growing market for online games, Bharti Airtel Limited, India’s largest private broadband and telephone service provider, has partnered with Indiagames Limited to launch a games-on-demand service on its broadband network. (Indiagames is backed by Cisco Systems and Adobe Systems’ Macromedia.)
The service is going to cost roughly $5-a-month and offers unlimited access to single player and multiplayer games and includes games like Age of Empires, Star Fury, Driv3R and Flight Simulator.
“With over 85% of games in India being sold illegally, we believe that with our unparalleled price offering we will significantly expand the segment of legitimate sales and bring the experience of high quality online gaming to millions of gamers in India,†said Vishal Gondal, founder and director of Indiagames.
At 1.5 million users, India’s broadband market is small and growing at a sluggish pace. Gondal said the gaming service would spur broadband usage in India’s urban and semi-urban areas. Well, it did wonders in South Korea, Japan and China. Maybe this is the little nudge India needs.
Written by Shailaja Neelakantan on July 28th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on India Telecom and online games.
Qualcomm’s (QCOM) cell phone tax has been clashing with carriers in developing markets recently. The San Diego giant has a patent portfolio that lets it take a percentage of every CDMA handset sold, including patents for 3G.
Over the past few weeks, three carriers with large CDMA networks — China Unicom in China, Reliance in India, and Vivo in Brazil — have been reported to be investing in GSM networks in part to avoid the Qualcomm toll system.
While the carriers and cell phone makers will all upgrade to 3G eventually, delivering Qualcomm their payoffs soon enough, in the short term, possible losses on CDMA in developing markets could be a real concern to the San Diego giant–those carriers are estimated to make up as much as 5% of Qualcomm’s sales for 2006!
Qualcomm’s senior director of corporate communications Jeremy James had a pretty strong statement on the situtation. He said that the companies that are making the most money off of GSM, like Nokia (NOK), and Ericsson (ERICY) are creating “fear, uncertainty, and doubt” over a “false notion” of how Qualcomm’s royalties effect the availability of low-cost handsets.
He also said that GSM network companies like Ericsson are making CDMA carriers in developing markets “very attractive” offers to build and run GSM networks as “a last ditch effort” to try to maintain their traditional GSM shares as long as possible before the 3G future.
There might be some truth to Qualcomm’s complaint, but with a grain of salt. Analysts like Aman Kapoor from Packetology say that Reliance is probably building a GSM network just to better negotiate with Qualcomm over current royalties for CDMA when it expands that network. Since Qualcomm doesn’t disclose its fees beyond a range, it’s hard to tell exactly how much the royalty fee affects the total cost of the handset.
Nokia’s VP of external affairs, Bill Plummer, responded to Qualcomm’s statement by saying “that is certainly one way to look at the evolution of the wireless market. Another way would be to acknowledge that this is a highly competitive market where operators recognize the inherent benefits associated with open, non-proprietary, globally scalable networks like GSM.”
The real truth is that as all the carriers move to 3G, Qualcomm can quadruple its addressable market in the long term. As 3G handsets start to become more popular, Qualcomm is already growing sales and profits — last week the company reported $1.95 billion in revenues, with $643 million in net income for the third quarter, up 44% and 15% respetively.
But when it comes to its relationships with competitors and vendors the company seems to have few friends out there. Jupiter analyst Sharon Armbrust points out some of the data behind the complaints by the Nokia camp. But with complaints in various countries about its aggressive practices, the company can’t afford to alienate the world’s fastest growing markets India, China and Brazil.
Written by Katie Fehrenbacher on July 26th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on Unwired and India Telecom and qualcomm and nokia.
Last November, at IBF’s Investing in India conference, Vinod Khosla noted that India tends to be ten years behind China. “So if you missed the boat on China, you don’t want to miss the boat on India,” said Khosla. You could feel the anxiousness in the room. Since then, VCs have kept a close eye on India, leading to reports of an all too familiar scenario. Too much money chasing too few deals, and a dearth of very early stage funding.
And haven’t we heard this story before? Remember the last bubble and the India funds that didn’t go anywhere? No doubt, many tourist VCs will get burnt in India- much as they will in China. Still, the bold India strategies of some top US VC firms should be noted. And each one of the top tier firms is using their own different twist in discovering opportunities in India.
Norwest’s Pramod Haque has been the venture community’s most ardent drum beater about the importance of startups having an India game plan from day one. That’s a message he has been hammering home going on some four years now. But while the monomaniacal focus on capital efficiency may have been the call to arms back in the lean days of 2002, Norwest is now well positioned to take advantage of a different upside. They are even planning to open an office in India now.
The VC firm has one of the best vantage points to watch Indian companies move up the value chain and has already invested in Persistent, an Indian company that is pushing the envelope on homegrown product design.Matt Howard, another Norwest GP, said at the last TiE Con that his firm will use this deep experience with Indian design teams to fund companies with price points that will be able to target the Indian market, and not just hope to introduce cheaper products into Western markets. He also mentioned that several Norwest companies pursuing this strategy are in stealth mode. Not only could this lead to some very interesting deals, it will also contribute to Norwest know-how that will be increasingly relevant in the future.
Meanwhile, in a sign of how much things have changed in the heart of Silicon Valley, the venerable Sequoia Capital did no less than acquire a premier cross-border VC focusing on India, WestBridge Capital Partners. A few years ago, as the happy talk first started about the VC industry going global first started, Sequoia would joke that the five clocks lining its walls read “Sunnyvale, Mountain View, Cupertino, Fremont, and San Jose.”
Sequoia saw so much innovation in Silicon Valley that it didn’t really care to look much further. But while Sequoia is expanding its horizons geographically (the firm also has operations in China and Israel, under its own banner) it remains true to its philosophy of seeking, first and foremost, rapidly expanding markets. Many Sequoia India companies, highly profitable and quickly expanding, are bets on growing markets, not cutting-edge technology. These include 24/7 Customer, marketRx, AppLabs, and Astra Business Services, among others.
Written by Vishesh Kumar on July 16th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on Venture News and India Telecom.
It’s no secret that Qualcomm is the wireless company everyone loves to hate. For the mobile world, its the Microsoft of the industry, angering competitors in many markets it dominates through its aggressive–or many would say monopolistic–business practices. So it wasn’t so suprising that Texas Instruments and Broadcom joined the ranks of the anti-Qualcomm league, accusing the company of abusing its stranglehold on the South Korean wireless market. TI and Broadcom were two of the six companies that filed similar complaints against Qualcomm in Europe as well.
It is important to note, that the San Diego giant has a patent portfolio which is pretty far reaching and protects the chip maker from its rivals. Still, the company’s stock has taken a turn for the worse, because of all the negative news.
And that wasn’t the first time Qualcomm has angered competitors in Korea. At the CTIA show in Las Vegas this April, Qualcomm CEO Paul Jacobs spoke to a room of reporters on its great relationships with local parters in international markets, while his PR team left a stack of papers at the door trying to explain why that week Qualcomm’s South Korean offices had been raided by the Korean Fair Trade Commission.
With royalty rates like 5.25% on local Korean CDMA handsets and 5.75% on exports by South Korean manufacturers, according to the AFP article, its not hard to see why companies are disgruntled. [Qualcomm doesn’t reveal its exact royalty rates.] Others are concerned that Qualcomm will try to assert those high royalty rates through other wireless technologies beyond CDMA in South Korea, through its Flarion’s tech–though WiBro is getting touted pretty aggressively.
In India, Qualcomm is finding problems too. Media reports says Reliance is focusing on its GSM network, and not its CDMA network, in part due to Qualcomm’s high royalties.
Qualcomm has said it will try to work with partners to lower the cost of handsets, not the royalties. Guess the idea is that if you can strong arm others to take the cut, then you don’t have to. The plan makes money in the short term, but in the long run, pissed off partners isn’t a good business model.
Written by Katie Fehrenbacher on July 4th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on Unwired and Cellular and Wireless Broadband and India Telecom and qualcomm and WiBro.
South Korean companies have a pretty interesting plan to turn their version of (mobile) WiMAX aka WiBro into a global standard: go after some of the fastest growing emerging markets, and get the necessary scale to compete with rivals, mostly from the US. A few months of making a WiBro play in Brazil, South Korean companies are now targeting India.
Samsung , encouraged by some of the recent spectrum allocations in the 2.3 GHz to 2.5 GHz and 3.5 GHz bands in India, is now attempting to sell its gear which would allows 2 megabits download speed, and upload of 1 megabit per second. The company sees huge potential in the rural areas and regions that are off the main grids. Samsung vice-president (global marketing group) Dr Hung Song says the company is in talks with some Indian operators for the possible roll-out of WiBro in the near future.
Written by Om Malik on June 26th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on Wireless Broadband and India Telecom.
Improbable as it may seem, but the bandwidth glut created by the telecom bubble of the late nineties might be coming to an end. Or there is at-least light at the end of the tunnel. Many of the major long haul service providers are in fact are in the process of lighting up their dark fiber to add capacity. There is talk of a new transpacific cable being laid by a new group. The network operators who are looking to add more capacity include VSNL, FLAG Telecom, Asia Netcom, and Telefonica.
But unlike the 1990s, this time around the capacity is being added in a as-needed basis, according to research firm, Telegeography. The demand is being driven by a big growth in consumer broadband connections, says Alan Mauldin research analyst with Telegeography. The growth has particularly strong in Asia, and Latin America, where traffic has more than doubled, Mauldin says.
Point Topic, another research firm estimates that there were 209.3 million global broadband users at end of 2005 up 56.2 million or 37% from 153.3 million lines on 31 December 2004. In some countries, such as Brazil, Russia, India and China, the demand for high speed connections is still in early stages, and that is why many in the industry are hopeful that the glut might be over.
The best news however, is the likelihood of a balance between supply and bandwidth demand. A lot also has to do with rapid consolidation in the telecom industry. AT&T+SBC+ BellSouth, Verizon+MCI, Tata Telecom+VSNL+Teleglobe+Tyco Network, and Reliance-FLAG Telecom are some of the key deals that have managed to take off excess capacity off the market.
Lately, Level 3 has been on a buying binge and has acquired Wil-Tel, Progress Telecom and last week there was word that they might acquire ICG Communications. (The news could be announced this week, some say.)
In addition to the consolidation, the demand for bandwidth for new fangled applications like IPTV, VoIP, build-out of new networks are helping equipment providers turn the corner, but the wholesale bandwidth prices are still too low for big backbone companies to turn a profit. And when that happens, perhaps we can be comfortable in publicly admitting that the telecom turn around is in full swing.
If The New York Mets can be 9-2 at the end of first two weeks of the new baseball season, then anything is possible.
Written by Om Malik on April 17th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on Uncategorized and India Telecom.