Telcos closed eco-system (Section 3)

We will start with two questions

1)”why not this large set of mobile users experience the features of Internet”

2)”where is the GAP?”

If we take India as example, there are very limited mobile operators, they have invested lot of money in infrastructure and government.  So they have to get back the money from users.  Will the break even happen and when user will be given more data services and VOIP services.  Stopping data and mobile Internet technology growth is not the solution. Solution is to adapt to new revenue models and business innovations.

Today,   voice calls is their primary revenue so they stick to it.  There are lot of Telcos tariffs but every tariff will have the concept of local call or STD call.  Why don’t we have the standard rate according to direct network resource usage.

Facts about mobile users are 1) they may not have seen the computers 2) they may have no idea about the Internet 3) they may not have got graduation 4) whiz kids are also part of the enthusiastic group. So this is the opportunity and also growth factor of country.

Restrictions and problems we are facing today :
1) Even though the operators use Internet backbone as the transmission medium and connect to wireless in the last mile, they charge more

2) Myth of operators: Internet quality is “Best service” and wireless quality is “Assured service”. If any part of your transmission passes through the Internet then your wireless is also “Best Service”. This is the reason, cellphone quality is always less than land line phones. So my humble question, why don’t we use Internet directly.

3) All GPRS (data connections) connections will go through a HTTP proxy of the operator to restrict the user, i cannot directly access any web page or service. It also won’t allow any other protocol.

4) Murder of Technology: Tunnelling VOIP protocol over HTTP (because of proxy restriction) won’t work because they will introduce jitter and delay in the data packet connection. This is clearly to kill the packet data voice solutions. Not allowing any new technology to grow.  Intention is not to make the Operator as looser but to innovate in business models for new revenue streams.

5) Application developer, mobile manufacturer, customer, application service provider and everyone should go through the operator, they will decide the service or application. Even for your own content you need to pay more than 60% to the operator. This is a real bottleneck for small companies with innovative content and solution.

6) Most of the mobile manufacturers are running behind the operators, actually mobiles should be developed with respect to the user and to their needs not for the operators.

7) Government is running behind the operators because of huge licensing revenue model, but if we make it open system like Internet, government can actually gain more than the current model but it need to be worked out. Country’s growth will be very high.

8 ) Without any user permission, all the user info are given for credit card companies and consultant agencies. Most affected are corporate users. Operators are selling user profile information for very high cost. No cost advantage for the user. User Information security is must. (I have experienced with my operator, from next week of SIM purchase I got junk calls).

We call this ecosystem as “Telcos closed eco-system”

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