Telecom Tuesday: 3G Auctions, Advertisments,Mobile Banking

3G Auction Delayed,Yet Again

The Indian Government seems to have lost it way with the much awaited 3G auctions.If the Department of Telecom(DoT) is to beleived , the official 3g auctions might get delayed by a more than a month and start around the first week of March.DoT is yet to finalise the Notice Inviting Applications.

The 3G hype has been doing the rounds for quite sometime but it got delayed on a regular basis.India despite being one of the largest growing telecom network, is still waiting in wings to have access to the 3G network.More than that, the spectrum being offered is one of the lowest too.

The government has estimated to generate over Rs 25,000 crore (Rs 250 billion) from the sale of 3G spectrum. The government has fixed the reserve price of Rs 3,500 crore (Rs 35 billion) for pan-Indian spectrum.

With so much revenue at stake, one would assume that things would at a brisk pace.But, alas the bureaucracy looms large and typical to the Indian Government fraternity, there are valid reasons all the time.The DoT initially cited concerns from the Defence Department over the number of allotted slots.

The revised schedule is estimated to be announced by the next month and the government is still maintaining its stand that the entire spectrum would be allotted to the winners simultaneously by August 2010.

Well, all we can do is wait and watch.

RCOM and Idea Advertisements taken off for misleading people

Just when we thought the Indian Telco sectors do a brilliant job with their media campaigns specially advertisements , the Advertising Standards Council of India (AICA) has pulled up 2 telcos for running misleading campaigns.The culprits are Reliance Communications and Idea.

RCOM failed to substantiate its claim “with comparative data of other mobile services” that the company is the “fastest mobile broadband service in India”.RCOM is now making changes to its TV campaign

Idea’s ‘Walk N Talk’ campaign was seemingly a hit with the audience.However, the AICA has found a valid hole in the TVC.A few customers seem to have suggested to AICA that the campaign promotes the unsafe act of ‘Walking and Talking’. Now, come to think of it is actually very reasonable.The idea was seemingly good but the campaign failed to make a clear distinction of which places it is good to ‘Walk and Talk’.I wonder if the folks at Idea are re-considering their branding slogan “What (Not) an Idea Sirjee”

Will Mobile Banking see a upsurge with increase transaction limit

Mobile Banking – one of the most used mobile application by Indians might see a huge surge with the new mobile banking policies announced by the RBI. RBI has increased the cap on transferring funds or payments through mobile phones to Rs 50,000.This is a huge hike from the the earlier limit of 5000 for shopping and 10,000 for services.

RBI has cited the reasons for increasing the limit saying that the existing limit is not sufficient for certain transactions such as Air Ticket Booking. The new policies have already been implemented by 21 out of the 32 mobile banking lenders allowed by the RBI.

However, it will be interesting to see if the 47 million odd mobile banking users actually indulge in making transactions via their mobile phone or they primarily use it for making enquiries of their account balance etc.If there is decent volumes of mobile banking transactions via purchase of goods/services , then this new hike might come as god send for customers as well as companies.Like E-Commerce on the web, security will still be a major hindrance in stream rolling mobile banking services.

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Author: Ankit Agarwal

Ankit Agarwal is an ERP Consultant by profession, a wannabe entrepreneur and stock market stalker by passion. You can follow him on twitter @ankit_a

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