{"id":203,"date":"2006-07-01T19:38:09","date_gmt":"2006-07-01T14:08:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wokay.in\/2006\/07\/01\/telecom-is-a-special-case\/"},"modified":"2006-07-01T19:38:09","modified_gmt":"2006-07-01T14:08:09","slug":"telecom-is-a-special-case","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/2006\/07\/01\/telecom-is-a-special-case\/","title":{"rendered":"Telecom is a Special Case"},"content":{"rendered":"

Some time ago- I can’t remember the exact date- there was an argument at young Shivam’s blog about what the poster child of Indian reforms was- Shivam said it was BPO, while Gaurav Sabnis said that telecom was a better example. A link isn’t provided because that particular post was deleted when Shivam transmogrified into Albert Krishna Ali.<\/p>\n

I realised- admittedly some months late- that Gaurav’s assertion about telecom being the poster child was slightly flawed. The telecom sector can be a poster child, but it’s a very unrealistic poster child. All other things being equal, the kind of growth the telecom sector has seen won’t be matched by any other sector.<\/p>\n

The reason for this, of course, is the good old network effect<\/a>. Telecom growth feeds on itself because every time the number of users increases, it makes even more sense for a nonuser to become a user- there are that many more people to contact when he<\/em> takes a phone. On the other hand, an increase in the number of motorcycle users doesn’t make motorcycles more or less attractive to other users.<\/p>\n

This raises two questions:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Given the same level of reform, is there any other sector in India which will see the same level of growth?<\/li>\n
  2. Out of all the industries which don’t benefit from network effects, which one can<\/em> be a realistic poster child for reform?<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    In keeping with the grand tradition of procrastination on this blog, I will answer both of these in separate posts.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Some time ago- I can’t remember the exact date- there was an argument at young Shivam’s blog about what the poster child of Indian reforms was- Shivam said it was BPO, while Gaurav Sabnis said that telecom was a better example. A link isn’t provided because that particular post was deleted when Shivam transmogrified into […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_hide_featured_image":false,"_jetpack_featured_image_duplicate_dismissed":0,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-203","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business-and-economics"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7AOU2-3h","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/203","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=203"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/203\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=203"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=203"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=203"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}