It Isn’t Just…

February 10, 2006

It isn’t just Reliance Infocomm which tries to cheat BSNL. BSNL employees do the same thing. So who’s to blame- Reliance, or the stupid system of tariffs and cross-subsisdies that sets up arbitrage opportunities like this in the first place?

It isn’t just airports which are seeing private participation and development. The MMRDA has received fifteen tenders for a new bus terminus to be run on a build-own-operate-transfer contract. Which should hopefully answer Dilip D’ Souza.

And it isn’t just Jayalalitha who nationalises industries to give political rivals a poke in the eye. The Andhra Pradesh government has just handed all the well-managed dairy cooperatives to the bureaucracy. Once again, the political rivals will eventually come back to power, and it’s the consumers and dairy farmers who’ll get shafted.


Municipal Wi-fi

January 11, 2006

Many American cities- San Francisco is the most well known example, but Philadelphia and some others are also planning it- are planning to roll out free wireless broadband networks covering the entire city.

If you have an opinion, please answer the following questions:

  1. Is this a waste of public money? Shouldn’t municipalities be more concerned with providing water, police and fire services, garbage disposal and so on?
  2. Would your answer to question 1 change if the city in question was Bombay or Bangalore or Belgaum or Patiala? Why?

Update: For question two, I don’t really care about the relative waste of public money, or that San Francisco can afford to waste public money. What I’m asking is if internet access is an essential municipal service in the first world and not the third (or two-point-fifth) world.


Data Mining or Dumb Luck?

December 1, 2005

I got this SMS from Airtel today:

Dear customer, Congrats! In appreciation of your long-standing association,we have actvd ISD facility without any additional deposit, w.e.f 23-Nov-05. Thank you

I wish Airtel wouldn’t use SMS-ese in their offficial messages. It’s irritating. But that aside, I’m thrilled I’ve finally got ISD without having to shell out a deposit. I’m on a peculiar plan- it’s a postpaid plan meant for salaried people, but the Airtel sales office offered it to IIMB students. The problem with that is that to activate long distance calls to landlines, or international calls to any phone, you had to deposit your salary slip. Without a salary slip, you had to deposit ten thousand rupees. Ouch.

Anyway, their customer sercive centre calls me every two months or so and tries to sell me an add-on service. I usually decline, but when the call centre would ask if there’s something I’d rather have instead, I used to tell them how irritating it was not to have an ISD facility. Now, they’ve given it to me just for sticking on for fifteen months.

What is now intriguing me is- did they give this freebie to everyone who’s been on for fifteen months, and has paid bills (very substantial bills indeed at one point of time) promptly? Or, did the customer service rep actually flag the fact that I wanted ISD, enter it into their CRM package, which decided that I would like an ISD facility best when it went through the records and saw that I had been on the same connection for fifteen months. What’s more- is Airtel’s data mining smart enough to figure out that if the bulk of someone’s bill comes from national long distance calls, (s)he might be an even juicier prospect for international long distance?

I’m not too sure. Their Karnataka database was pathetic six months ago- the Airtel centre didn’t know how much I had on deposit, how long I’d had roaming, or how long I’d had my connection. My request to terminate roaming vanished into the ether, and I finally did it myself online when they revamped their website (which now works really well). Still, six months is a long time, and maybe they’ve refined their CRM a lot since then.

Does anybody know if this zero deposit on ISD has been offered to more people than me, or about Airtel’s CRM in general? Comment or drop me a line, please.


Competition at the Bottom of the Pyramid

November 15, 2005

Two interesting links. First, MobilePundit links to an Economics Times piece on Bharti and Motorola entering a retail tie-up to sell Motorola handsets. As I mentioned earlier on my old blog, Motorola is selling Bharti the sub-$40 C110 series phones at discounted rates.

Now, Business Standard is reporting that Philips is looking at the bottom of the Indian pyramid, and is trying to gain a lead in mobile phones by coming up with a sub-$20 phone.

I’ll believe a twenty dollar new phone when I see it- there’s a high chance that the Philips CEO is simply putting fart- but the fact that he’s said it it does indicate that there’s going to be competition in this segment. Which is good for consumers, and even better for society in the long run.