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CDMA 2000 1x Comes to India
nilesh writes "Yesterday, Reliance Infocomm launched one of the largest CDMA networks in the world [Google news]. This wireless network will cover 90% of India's population on a backbone of 60,000 kms of optic fibre. They have dreams of providing an Internet-enabled Java-powered CDMA2000 1x phone to almost every Indian citizen for around tariffs as low as 40 paise per minute or 0.8 cents per minute. The Samsung/LG/Kyocera phones will be replete with applications ranging from internet banking to video on demand and online gaming. Now all we need is Quake for Java and we'll have college kids playing deathmatches with each other in classroom at 144kbps. The next game revolution is in sight."
How long until the USA^H^H^HCorporations sets up a Great-Wall-of-China-Firewall, to filter out tech stories, so citizens don't pine for better technology...
Somehow I fail to be impressed by the service even before it becomes operational. I mean, come on, India is a developing country with salaries at least an order of magnitude lower than you're avarage. 10h (which is moderate use... for a day) with $.08 per minute is $48. This is my monthly bill for cable tv and 512kbps internet over cable. And I consider this bill too high...
Robert
Bastard Operator From 193.219.28.162
It's hard to get excited about 144Kbps when 802.11 hotspots are popping up like wildfire. The math is easy to figure out... 11M vs 144K. Granted, I can't drive through town downloading email while in my car over roaming hotspots ((yet)) but then again, the likelyhood of getting dropped by Sprint PCS even in major corridors makes that a "so-what" in my book.
The real reason that CDMA gets me excited is as an augmentation to WLAN connections. To at least have some net connectivity if I'm hopping between hotspots. Not as a replacement for high-speed connections. The ILECs and other broadband carriers have nothing to fear from CDMA and should begin to embrace working together with them.
Why? Because at the end of the day, it's still cheaper, faster, and better to have your connection over physical fibre and no wireless carrier in the world can replace the stuff that is already buried in the ground.
The surest sign of intelligent life in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us. -- Calvin & Hobbes
Science always advances. Technology makes inroads. The aim is to make lives easier for *most* people, not *all* people. Even the US has not been able to ensure that each of its citizens have their basic needs met, or that the fruits of technology have reached all.
So the next time you hear a story about India or Jordan or Brazil or any other developing country trying to improve the life of its citizens, try to be understanding, if not a cheerleader. And quit your high-horse!
Easy, they've got their foot on the accelerator of new technology, new ideas, new rules, and new freedoms.
In contrast, we've got our foot on the brake of new constraints like "Intellectual Property", new "growth" areas like patents on everything, and new laws to ensure that old business doesn't succumb to the new.
To which continent do you think the label of "progressive" applies best?
The only reason we're still doing as well as we are here in the "first" world is because we have a large head of steam and massive resources from past years, and a world bank that knows on which side its toast is buttered. If everyone were to start afresh right now, our only growth industry would be in lawyers and related non-producers of wealth. It's kind of depressing.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
Yeah, and guess who is still in business today? It is hard to run a service like that for free. Ricochet sunk huge amounts of money into their infrastructure, and even that was only in a small number of places. On the other hand, they had a tiny number of users compared to cellular carriers.
If it's any consolation, think of it this way: your l33t wireless service got paid for by rich venture capitalists, and any use you got out of it is money no longer in their pockets.
Tsunami -- You can't bring a good wave down!
How about giving these people some food;
Who will give them food?
How about teaching them to make food more efficiently, clean their water, and run power lines? It would solve the problem fundamentally, and is much cheaper than external involvement.
Tsunami -- You can't bring a good wave down!
- In some southern Indian states, fishermen have found a great use of cellphones. When they go out to sea for fishing, on the way back they call at all of the local harbors within their range, and find the best price for their catch! Some fishermen have found that their cellphone paid for itself in just a couple of weeks.
- Farmers can keep in touch with their nearby mandis (wholesale markets), and strike deals which will maximise their gain from their harvest (i.e., pick the right time, sell their produce in advance, checkout prices at all nearby places and take their produce to the one with the highest prices, etc.).
These are but 2 examples; I'm sure if someone did a study, you'd find 100s more.I liken this new technology to what happens when a man-made wreck lands at the bottom of the sea. Nature quickly finds ways to use the wreck to its advantage: new coral colonies bloom, fishes use it as their hideout, etc. Similarly, the people of India will quickly adapt and find ways to leverage this new technology in ways that we, here in the west, can't even imagine. I say more power to them!
I hate to flame, but this obviously will not work.. this is a very idealistic approach at trying to help a poverty stricken society keep up with the times.. i mean, most of them don't even have a television set probably and here they are.....besides there are many other issues to deal with in India (health wise, primarily) than hoping that every citizen in India will have their own cell phone.
This is really just a variation of another bankrupt argument that never seems to go away despite being refuted over and over again:
"How can we even talk about space exploration while there is so much suffering here on earth?"
Of course, we get to have cellphones in this country because our poor people have TV sets!
How do you know that cellphones won't stimulate India's economy? Should all industries there be suppressed until a large middle class develops? Remember that while India is mostly known for its poor people, the people in its upper classes are filthy rich and would be more than willing to fork over some rupees every month for good cellphone coverage.
(BTW don't take the "freak" icon personally- you must have said something a long time ago that pissed me off but frankly I have no idea what anymore. I also have no idea what I said to get my own collection of fans and freaks. Being able to associate a specific post with a friend/foe assignment would be a nice Slashcode feature.)
It is true the that the 300million strong middle class exist. It is also true that the rest are struggle to survive and suffer abject poverty. One fact doesn't obfustace other.
India is poor for centuries. We just don't know any better. However US in its glorious 60s, admist moon landings and transistor invention was lynching innocent men, women, and children - despite the superior education, facilities, economy, and resources. So what was that you were saying about 'tough love'?
"India is poor for centuries. We just don't know any better." Another pathetic excuse from another selfish, callous indian bastard. There is just NO excuse for the way you heartless scoundrels treat your own kind. For God's sake, if you can make nukes and shoot satellites into space at least you should be able to create an infrastructure that can feed, clothe and house the 100s of millions of indians who go hungry every day!
Get off this idealistic high horse. Think a little before posting. Are you suggesting that Reliance, a corporate that has been very successful in the sectors that it operates in (synthetic textile bases, petrochemicals) and is now moving into telecom, starts providing "clean drinking water, sewer, and civil support systems"?
Reliance is doing what a business should do. If more companies like Reliance do business, profitably, then the Government of India will have money to spend on social welfare.
And, before generalising, think again. India has a middle class larger than the population of the United States. There are probably more television sets in India than in the US. They _need_ access to cheap telephony, and they can afford to pay for it. Not what you suckers in the US pay, but reasonable rates.
The TRAI (telecom regulator) in India does not approve predatory pricing, which is what it calls pricing call tariffs below cost. The fact that these low tariffs have been approved, indicate that they are above cost for the operator.
For GPRS to work, spectrum has to be dedicated to data and voice separately. Existing GSM providers need to license more spectrum (this costs big money), have to upgrade their equipment and convince users to change handsets to support 2.5G ("GPRS"). Considering that they are all in the red, it ain't going to be easy. CDMA providers can provide voice+data over the same spectrum.
Because 3G deployments in Europe and Japan so far have been less than successful.
Because CDMA 2000 1X is coming with a massive second mover advantage, at a time when people need higher data rates from their mobile, and the GSM folk can't given them that quickly, the operative word being 'quickly'.
I agree a GSM-based high-speed standard would have been better. But the only way high-speed GSM would have taken off in India was if someone built a W-CDMA (which is the air interface for high speed GSM) network from scratch, and given European and Japanese experience with W-CDMA 'til now, I'd excuse any business for being slightly scared about this :).
In Brasil people are complaining every day that government has chosen TDMA and CDMA over the cheaper, standard GSM.
Huh? TDMA is the air interface for vanilla GSM. High speed GSM uses W-CDMA as the air interface because TDMA is so damn inefficient. Anyway, what business does the government have mandating technology? (Europe did this, mind you :-p) All they should sell is spectrum!
Every country has a black mark. How do you justify American action in Iraq? Perhaps they have a point, perhaps they do not.
How about Pakistan, which sponsors terrorist activities, is ruled by a military dictator and whose intelligence agency ISI is *confirmed* to have ties with the underworld in India?
India has a rocket scientist for a president, a *democratically elected* president, while being surrounded by a Military Dictatorship (ruling a fundamentalist country) on one side and a Communist Dictatorship on the other.
India is a developing nation, and has it's own set of problems in healthcare and basic utilities, I do agree. But technology IS the ONLY way out of this mess. Only when you educate people about the ill effects of bad environments, AIDS and the like will there be progress. People NEED to know.
Yes, we have sectarian violence. Try having a billion people of disparate cultural differences, with hundreds of languages, who have been exploited by colonialism for 400 years. You will then know.
Keeping them in the dark only worsens the situation. People *need* to be taught that this would not help in the long run. People need to be taught tolerance.
Technology has done a wealth of good for us, with revolutions in the agro sector, IT industry and now communication industry.
More the money the industries make, more the revenue the govt. earns, and the society as a whole benefits. And you have a booming economy, with a growing middle class which is tech savvy.
Please tell me what is wrong with this. I fail to see how something as beneficial as technology is going to do ill to a society.
Unforunately, people like "metlin" forget that their country needs to be brought up from 3rd world status and that will not happen by giving people cell-phones.
Incorrect reference, third world refers to Non-Aligned Nations, and has nothing to do with economic development. Developing nations would be an appropriate usage. Technology is not the end, it is the means to solving world's problems. If you think otherwise, you're a fool.
Most of the achievements in the Western world have come from hardwork and a sincere desire to change. Technological advances were created with the evolution of society not by handing them technology.
Huh? What the hell did you just blabber? Oh so wait, we want to have technology so that we can sit and play Quake all day? Or wait, technology happens on its own without us having to work or just loitering around or what?
What an absurd statement. Technology arms people. Technology gives people the power to do things that they thought impossible, and improves their standard of living. It does not happen overnite, and it does not happen to everybody. But it does happen, it is a process and it will take time.
But that does not mean that its all useless. This is one of the MOST STUPID comments I've EVER read on
Duh.