After the TRAI’s directive to introduce stringent fines on Telecom Operators as well as marketers, Spam calls and SMSes to Indian mobile subscribers have definitely reduced. If the earlier frequency of such smses were 10 a day, it has come down to probably 2 or 3 a day. Though, the problem of Pesky messages did not resolve completely.

The reason is that marketers found new ways to circumvent this ban. The TRAI directive was applicable to local telecom operators, but not the international ones. Marketers took advantage of this and started sending these bulk smses through international gateways. Infact, no sooner did that TRAI ruling came into effect on 27th September 2011, many companies started advertising their services of sending Bulk smses through International gateways.

TRAI has taken note of this and has now come out with yet another ruling to ban bulk international smses. To address unsolicited commercial communications and to effectively control SMS coming from international locations, TRAI today issued a  direction to all the Access Providers and the operators mandating them to take the following steps, within next thirty days:

• All international SMS  containing alphabet header or alphanumeric header  or +91 as originating country code should not be delivered through the network.
• If any source or number from outside the country generates more than 200 SMSes per hour with similar ‘signature’, the same  should not be delivered through the network.
• Only valid codes associated with the network  of those entities  with whom agreements have been signed by the Access Providers shall be allowed in the network.

Essentially, within next 30 days, most mobile subscribers in India should be fully Spam-SMS-Free, unless marketers find yet another way to circumvent. Though, in my personal opinion, this should be final nail in the coffin for marketers as far as sending unsolicited messages go. Even if they end up finding any other way, it would not be cost effective or feasible enough for marketers to use it!

[TRAI ruling PDF]

No related posts.

I did not expect the Great Indian Telecom Growth story to start stuttering so fast! According to latest TRAI report for November 2011, India added mere 2.97 million new mobile subscribers – A number which is probably lowest in past more than 5 years. In last 3 years, India has been averaging additions of close to 15 million subscribers month on month

Now, I do need to add a caveat here, before making it sound too bleak. Tata has been loosing its market share considerably over past few months, and this month it is showing huge negative growth. Infact, according to the report, Tata has lost a whooping 4.45 million subscribers in month of November alone – I am really not sure what is the reason behind this. And, MNP surely cannot be the reason for loosing such a large chunk of subscribers, as overall MNP requests were pegged at 2.7 million.

Fall in Telecom Subscriber Growth

If you see the table it is clear that low number of additions is not a one-off case, but the fall in subscriber additions has been gradual, which points to the fact that Indian subscriber base is now nearly saturated and earlier rate of additions should not be expected.

Telecom Subscriber Addition Highlights – November 2011

• Total Telecom Subscriber base stands at 917.33 million users.
• Mobile Subscriber base stands at 884.37 Million users, addition of 2.97 million subscribers over October.
• Wireline Subscriber base stands at 32.96 million, fall of about 0.69%.
• India has 581.33 million urban & 303.04 million rural subscribers.
• Overall Tele-density in India stands at 73.44 percent.
• 2.67 million users requested for Mobile Number Portability in month of November 2011. 23.2 millions mobile users have opted for mobile number portability till date.
• Active Mobile subscribers on the date of peak VLR in November 2011 stand at 635.39 Mln

Operator wise Monthly Mobile Subscriber Addition – November 2011

Like previous month, Idea and Uninor have gained large chunk of subscribers, while Tata has seen biggest fall. Idea added 2.17 million & Uninor added 1.86 million new mobile subscribers in November 2011. On the other hand Tata lost whooping 4.4 million subscribers – This sure has to be some kind of previous mis-calculation which has been corrected now and hence showing such a big fall!

Operator wise Mobile Subscriber Market Share – November 2011

Bharti remains at the top with close to 1/5th of Indian mobile market share. While Idea is gaining market share rapidly, Tata is loosing it even faster and now stands at 9.43% compared to 10.16% previously.

Broadband Subscriber Growth – November 2011

Total Broadband subscriber base increased from 12.98 Mln  in Oct 2011 to 13.13 million at the end of November 2011, there by showing a monthly growth of 1.21%. 

Yearly growth in Broadband Subscribers has been 22.58% during the last one year.

[Entire TRAI report pdf]

No related posts.

This looks like precisely the reason why Government has been so silent on matters pertaining to access of data from biggies like Nokia, RIM, Apple and others. They made a big hue & cry about it earlier last year, but everything went silent and no action was taken after threatening the likes of RIM & Nokia.

The real reason seems that these telecom & software companies may have made a secret tie-up. And if the hacker group and leaked memo documents are to be believed, Indian Government Agencies already have full access to all your communication on mobile.

According to a memo leaked by hacker group called – The Lords of Dharmaraja -  few days back (which was earlier posted on pastebin, but later was removed), who had hacked into Indian Military Intelligence servers, clearly gives details of the API specifications as well as the  memo document.

Hacker’s post which is still available on Google Cache

Excerpts from Leaked Memo Document

The above 2 images are from the entire 6 page leaked memo document that was released by the hacker group.

If you see, in the first para of the memo, it is clearly stated that the agreement was signed with these mobile manufacturers in exchange of Indian Market presence and the last para of the memo states that the security agencies (MI and CBI) are satisfied with the results of RINOA SUR platform (RINOA stands for RIM, Nokia and Apple). See the highlighted text in images.

According to this slashdost post,

The Indian government "utilized backdoors provided by RINOA" to intercept internal emails of the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, a U.S. government body with a mandate to monitor, investigate and report to Congress on ‘the national security implications of the bilateral trade and economic relationship’ between the U.S. and China

The big question here is – What about privacy? Is this ethical? and more so what can the Blackberry, Nokia or Apple users do about it?

Comments are open

[Sources & References: ZDnet Post , Slashdot post, Computerworld]

Related posts:

1. Nokia partners with RCom to provide personalized content, but where is the media presence? [Media Monday]
2. Nokia comes up with a relatively cheaper touch screen phone to woo Indian masses !
3. Nokia X2-01 – Cheapest Smartphone by Nokia.. Will it succeed?

An excellent directive from consumer perspective for sure – TRAI yesterday came out with a directive that stating

Every  service provider shall, within  forty-five days of coming into  force of these regulations, establish a ‘Web Based Complaint Monitoring System’ to enable the consumers to monitor the status of their complaints.

The directive also stated that Telecom Operators will have to widely publicize this in media so that consumers are aware about it.

I am sure majority of telecom customers have faced this issue where they have lodged a complaint with their Telecom provider and subsequently no action has been taken. The worst part is calling the call center, which in itself is such a big pain that consumer chooses to ignore rather than spend precious time pursuing the outcome of complaint made.

The directive by TRAI released yesterday not only talks about the web based complaint monitoring system, but also about various other aspects on resources & infrastructure that a telecom Customer Service center should have. It is good to see that TRAI is taking several measures to ensure good Quality of Service provided by telecom service providers to its customers.

TRAI also has given a timeline of 45 days for everything to be implemented by these telecom operators!

Change in Customer Redressal Mechanism

The new process replaces the old 3 tier mechanism, where Call Centre, Nodal Centre and Appellate Authority we involved. In new process Nodal office is done away with – and If a consumer is not satisfied with the redressal of his complaint, he can directly approach the next tier – the Appellate Authority for redressal of his complaints.

The only issue in the new process which may again be counter productive is that Telecom Operator themselves have to appoint the Appellate Authority, who may probably be biased towards the operator.

Read the entire TRAI directive here and let us know what you feel about it!

Related posts:

1. Very soon mobile users can directly file complaint online to TRAI
2. TRAI directs Telcos not to reject MNP requests on Flimsy grounds!
3. TRAI Wants Telecom Service Providers To Use Locally Manufactured Products

I am sure you have heard this phrase often – “Arre yaar mujhe missed call de de sirf” – Missed call phenomenon is rampant in India and it is for a reason. It helps millions of people in India communicate for free.

It is also something that Telecom Operators probably hate the most. Users using missed call feature, use up quite a bit of network bandwidth, yet operators are unable to make a single penny out of it and they cannot do anything about it.

It is reasons like these that India has lowest ARPU’s in the world. The call rates are so low, that it is nearly impossible for operators to lower any further. Competing on call rates is now thing of past – Mobile VAS is in thing. Every operator is coming up with a unique VAS service to entice users.

Unlike most countries, India has 95% prepaid subscribers, where mobile subscribers recharge their mobile very frequently. There are mobile recharge available as low as Rs. 10 (approx. 20 cents), where a user can make about 10 -15 calls and receive calls as well.

The downside of these low denomination recharges - you are caught stranded when you have no balance in your account. No outgoing calls or SMSes are possible.

Now, Airtel’s new innovative “Call me Back” service is planning to capitalize exactly on this issue. Even when out of balance, Airtel prepaid customers can now send an emergency ‘call me back’ SMS alert to a friend, This is possible even when the customer has no balance, and is unable to even make a ‘missed call’.

To avail this, Customers simply need to dial *141#. This service allows an Airtel prepaid mobile customer to send upto 5 call me back SMS alerts per month to other Airtel customers absolutely free of cost.

Additionally, Airtel has also launched a “Gifting Service” where subscribers on the Airtel network can send and receive talk time to each other and even give away mobile services’ gift packs anytime.

Both these services can really be a boon to Airtel pre-paid users when you are stuck with zero balance and want urgently make a call or send a sms! This is an useful service and I am sure other mobile operators will follow suite as well!

what do you think?

Related posts:

1. BSNL restores Call Access to Private Operators!
2. Changes to Do Not Call rules soon – Telecom Operators will now be responsible for Pesky Calls, SMSes!
3. Bharti Airtel hikes call tariffs – Will it be a New dawn for Indian Telecom landscape?

TRAI yesterday released the Indian Telecom Subscription data as of September 2011 and it is now clear that the growth of mobile subscribers is tapering off. What used to an average of around 15 million subscribers month on month is now averaging nearly half.

At the start of the year, I was quite confident that if the rate of growth remains constant, India will touch 1 Billion subscriber mark by year end. However, last 6 months have been quite sluggish. Take a look at the chart below that shows fall in numbers compared to March 2011.

Indian Mobile subscriber base addition since March 2011

In last 4 years, it is first time that less than 10 million mobile subscribers have been added consistently for 3 months in a row.

Snapshot of Mobile Subscriber additions in September 2011

The wireline subscriber base has been consistently falling over past 4 years, and this month was not different – it lost about 2.22% of subscribers. The total telecom subscriber base (mobile + wireline) in India now stands at 906.93 million.

Out of 7.90 million total mobile subscriber base added – 5.58 million were from urban, while 2.32 mobile subscribers came from rural areas. The total teledensity now stands 75.48%

Mobile Number Portability Requests

25.70 lakh mobile subscribers made MNP requests in September 2011 as compared to 25.12 lakh last month. The total MNP requests in the country now stands at 2.06 crore!

Operator wise Monthly Mobile Subscriber Addition

September proved to be a stellar month for Uninor – It added about quarter of all the mobile subscriber additions in month of September. Uninor is the only operator right now who is still playing on the game of low tarriffs. Currently, in terms of mobile tarriffs, they are the lowest. Infact, their recent launch of Zero Paise per second plan seems to have garnered them huge chunk of subscribers – 1.92 million to be precise

Idea seems to be the biggest gainer from MNP requests – Since last 3 months they have had more subscriber additions than the big 3 mobile operators – Bharti, Reliance & Vodafone!

Popular belief that MNP will help smaller operators seems to have vanished because most of the smaller players have lost subscribers to their bigger counterparts!

Operator wise Mobile Subscriber Market Share

The pecking order remains the same – Bharti leads with close to 1/5^th of total Indian Telecom Market share. Idea is gaining rapidly and now is 4th with 11.47% market share. For me, the biggest surprise Tata’s lack of growth in subscriber additions over last 6 months or so. They have lost over 2% of market share since then.

Broadband Subscriber Growth in August 2011

Broadband is growing at a snails pace, with only 1.5 Lakh new subscribers getting added in August. India now has a total Broadband subscribers base of 12.84 Million!

Check out the full TRAI press release.

Related posts:

1. Telecom subscribers base reaches 723 Million–Adds 17.11 million new wireless subscribers!
2. India reaches 787 Million Telecom subscribers… Mobile Subscribers stand at 752 million!
3. 20 Million new mobile subscribers added in Feb- Tally reaches 791 mn!

OK, I am pretty sure Indian Telecom bosses will not do the same, but you can never vouch for Babu’s in India…can you?

If you have already not heard about it, Pakistan’s Telecom Authority has come out with a ruling that all the telecom operators in Pakistan will have to ensure that around 1600 designated words will be banned while sending sms text messages. Today is the deadline for Pakistan’s Telecom Operators to implement the ban!

I can understand banning of certain keywords that probably are insulting to religious sentiments or are out-right obscene. If at all, count of such words should be in the region of 50 or max 100. But banning 1600 words is just unfathomable!. With that kind restriction every 10th message may get banned from being sent.

I just went through the 1695 words that have been published on Google Docs – and here are some words which I think just don’t make any sense.

1. Damn / Damn it
2. Deposit
3. Devil
4. Deeper
5. Dome
6. Fairy
7. God Damn
8. Harder
9. Headlights
10. Hell Yes
11. Hen House
12. joint
13. looser
14. lotion
15. quickie
16. robber
17. showtime

I mean I just don’t understand the reason for banning words like “fairy”, “robber” etc.. What should I do when I have to quickly message someone that “I have a robber in my house” !

Just for fun, I suggest you go ahead and have a look at the entire list – it will at least be good for laughs, if not anything else.

I really pity our Pakistani friends and I hope that DoT / TRAI do not follow the cue of their Pakistani counterparts and implement this sort of directive here as well!

What do you think?

Related posts:

1. Changes to Do Not Call rules soon – Telecom Operators will now be responsible for Pesky Calls, SMSes!
2. Indian Telecom Services Performance Report [TRAI ]
3. Telecom Buzz: Indian CDMA iPhone, Tata Docomo 3G launch, TRAI billing Audit, Olive Online store

Its been over a month since the new ruling over Do Not Disturb registry came into effect. I want to put forth this question to all our trak.in readers –

Did this new DND ruling make any difference?

The reason I am asking this question is – No sooner the new ruling came into effect, spammers and marketers found a way to circumvent it. Any marketer wanting to send bulk smses to mobile numbers can easily do so by tying up with many small companies who have started offering these bulk sms services.

Infact, in last one month, I have received atleast 5-6 smses and mails offering services regarding sending bulk marketing emails. Take a look at this following Email.

These service providers are not only sending emails & smses, but they are also blatantly posting this on public forums. If you read the above mail, especially point number 2 – “DND number will also receive SMS”, it quite clear that anyone can circumvent this new ruling. These smses are sent via international routes.

Who is responsible for sending these kind of spam smses? Because the new DND puts the blame entirely on Telecom Operators and they have to face heavy fines, incase the sms come from their network to mobile users.

Coming back to the original  question – Did new DND implementation make any difference? I would say “Yes, only to a certain extent”. The number of spam SMSes have gone down, but they do still come. If I received 5 a day earlier, now I get about 2 or 3. Also, spam calls have reduced (not completely gone).

What about you? what has been your experience?

Related posts:

1. New Yahoo Mail – will it make any difference?
2. R.I.P Pesky Calls & Spam SMSes from Sept. 27th!
3. Mumbai-Delhi boast most expensive streets in the world! Does that make any difference to us?

Ok, the last part of the title might have been a cheap shot but I thought it was necessary for my thoughts later in the post.

On to the matters of more importance now. Bharti Airtel has chosen to implement a new customer experience management (CEM) platform provided by Nokia Siemens Networks. With the new solution, Bharti Airtel expects to enhance the customer experience across multiple touch points and also provide the company with real-time insights into customer usage patterns.

The management speak sure seems to suggest that the solution is exactly what Airtel needs to keep its customers happy in the wake of company’s massive expansion, challenges in the Indian Telecom sector and not to forget the company’s notorious distinction of  being the leading operator in consumer complaints. Here is the statement from director of network group at Network Group,

The implementation of CEM is an added impetus to our constant endeavor of offering best in class service experience to our customers across GSM, EDGE and 3G networks. It will enable us to identify the root cause of a problem and rectify the same before the subscriber experiences any impairment in service delivery

I dug around a little into the CEM solution offering and the “real-time” and “proactive” approach that the solution promises could indeed be beneficial for mobile operators.

For example, NSN proposes that its CES solution can automatically flag and correct data access configuration settings for a subscriber in the event of subscriber failing to access data on his mobile. Now, wouldn’t that be great for a subscriber.

More than that, it will be great for Bharti Airtel because automated fault detection & remediation could free the company’s resources to focus on more strategic issues. After that, that has been the proverbial use case for outsourcing network operations et all to third-party providers till now.

Technology Is Not Always The Answer

With real-time systems also comes the power of getting a peak into subscriber usage patterns and Bharti Airtel is expected to use these insights to create better experiences for customers.

However, given the current state of affairs, I guess subscribers will be more than happy to get uninterrupted access to traditional voice & data services and if possible- workable solutions from customer care executives.

This brings me to introducing twitter complaints in the title of the post. All said and done, I wonder what is stopping Bharti Airtel to implement a decent Social CRM solution (please let me know if they already do).

More and more people are ranting about their frustrations about their mobile operators (Airtel is the not the only one) on twitter only to be slapped with template messages such as ‘Please DM us your number’ etc.

May be the operators have outsourced their social media to agencies but having a CRM system with interface to social networks atleast presents an opportunity to capture the customer complaint in the right fashion. So while, Bharti Airtel can implement n-number of technology solutions, it will have to take a more “hands-on” approach towards delighting the customer.

It will be another story if the new CEM solution is so robust and fail proof that customers will not have any reasons to complaint and voice their frustration on twitter or elsewhere but then who are we kidding here…

Do you think adding a customer experience management solution to its arsenal will help Bharti Airtel make the customer experience better leave side delighting the customer?

.

Related posts:

1. Telecom sector leads consumer complaints – Airtel Tops!
2. Bharti Airtel at the forefront of redefining ‘Twitter Via Mobile SMS’
3. What compelled Bharti Airtel exit bulk SMS business?