[polldaddy poll=9748071] Xiaomi today launched the Redmi 4 — its ‘entry level’ model with a 5-inch display, but a deeper look at the phone’s pricing reveals that the company may be moving away from its initial positioning as a value for money brand. At first glance, the device appears to be a true-blue entry-level Redmi phone — 2GB […]
Fierce competition from new entrant Reliance Jio is pushing the incumbent telecom operators Bharti Airtel, Reliance Jio and Vodafone India to accelerate negotiations to allow them to use each other’s full networks. As of now, these operators only share ‘passive’ or ‘dead’ infrastructure such as the physical tower and generator sets. Active infrastructure — or […]
Reliance Jio, the 4G operator that has taken the market by storm, has deployed the extra spectrum that it bought last year, increasing the total spectrum in use in most markets by 20-25%. In most circles, Jio is operating with about 40-50 MHz of spectrum, and with the new spectrum, this has gone up to […]
India’s largest telecom services company by revenue and spectrum holding, Bharti Airtel, will start diverting its 2G spectrum to add to its 4G network in the second half of the ongoing financial year, the company’s CEO said. The move will help increase 4G capacity of the operator by adding a carrier (5 MHz block) of […]
Idea Cellular, the telecom company controlled by the Aditya Birla group, said it will spend Rs 6,000 cr to expand its 3G and 4G services in the current financial year. The planned investment of Rs 6,000 cr has been “earmarked for expanding broadband coverage (and to) increase wireless data capacity” and for the launch of […]
Airtel Broadband, India’s second largest wired broadband service, will upgrade nearly all its DSL customers to its new ‘V Fiber’ vectorization technology that offers speeds of 40 Mbps, compared to 4-8 Mbps under the traditional ADSL 2 technology. Company CEO Gopal Vittal said this would make the copper-based offering more competitive with fiber-based offerings from […]
Reacting to falling usage of data on its network, Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd has increased the data available on its recharges, and introduced a daily data scheme priced at Rs 3099 for 90 days. The operator had, on Apr 1, doubled the data available on most of its 3G recharges, but had limited the new […]
Netflix, the world’s biggest provider of video-on-demand services, rebuffed attempts by telecom companies to control viewership of online video and said consumers must be allowed to consume any legal content on the Internet without ‘gate keeping’ or interference by telecom providers. It said its position was that “gate-keepers should not be in a position to […]
Mumbai will be the first city to get preview services of Reliance Jio’s Fiber services, which will come with a monthly cap of 100 GB of high-speed data, India Today reported, adding that users will have to pay Rs 4,500 as a refundable security deposit to avail of the preview offer. “The company — at […]
Maruti Suzuki said its revenue increased 20.3% in the three months from January to March this year compared to the same quarter last year, while net profit jumped 16%. “Growth in volumes, increase in share of the Company’s higher segment models, benefits due to full capacity utilization and cost reduction efforts contributed to increase in […]
The Anil Ambani Group has relaunched Bigflix, the homegrown competitor to Netflix, with an expanded focus covering regional language content as well as an eye on audiences outside India. The service will have 2000 HD movies in nine Indian languages to start with, the group said. These languages are Hindi, Telugu, Tamil, Punjabi, Malayalam, Gujarati, […]
Reliance Jio, the biggest carrier of wireless data in the world, said it will expand beta trials of its fiber-to-the-home services in the ‘next few months’ across India. It has already started these trials in “a few locations”, which would be expanded city by city. According to market sources, the company has such trials ongoing […]
Wireless data prices in India, which crashed from Rs 250 per GB to about Rs 10 per GB after the entry of Reliance Jio, will continue to remain under pressure for at least two more years, said analyst firm Credit Suisse. That is the minimum amount of time that the new entrant will take to […]
Vodafone India said it would like to be given the power to manage the size of videos watched by users on its mobile network and lower it automatically “for overall quality welfare”. Participating in the discussions related to Net Neutrality and the powers to be given to telecom operators in traffic management, the company said it did […]
If you thought the fight over net neutrality was over with the sending of 1 mln emails to the TRAI two years ago, think again. The telecom service providers, who lost out that in the first round, are back. This time, however, their demands are more subtle, and focused on getting specific services exempted from […]
Bharti Airtel said it would provide 100 GB of free high-speed data to anyone who purchases Amazon’s Fire TV Stick in India. The offer is available to Airtel customers on broadband as well as ‘4G Home Wifi’, but not to normal, handset-based 4G users. The data quota can be availed in buckets of 35 GB […]
Spectranet, which provides among the most affordable fiber-to-the-home services for high-volume users in India, said it had entered the Noida market. The company has started by providing broadband services in Sector 93 with more areas being added rapidly, it said. Among the plans being offered in NOIDA include a range of ‘truly unlimited plans’ that do […]
AirAsia said it will offer a 15% discount to all customers of Reliance Jio for flights booked this month for travel between Jun 20 to Sep 30. “All Reliance Jio customers get 15% off on domestic and international flights,” the airline tweeted. The booking has to be done using the AirAsia app and is available […]
Complaints against all telecom providers except Bharti Airtel dropped in 2016, possibly in reaction to the emergence of new operator Reliance Jio and the explosion of 4G data capacity. The total number of complaints lodged with the regulator TRAI against telecom firms dropped 15% in 2016 to 19,774 from 23,293 in 2015 and 20,386 in […]
SpiceJet has chosen HSBC Bank as its partner for receiving UPI payments on its website. UPI or Unified Payments Interface is an advanced, easy-to-use, cheap and real-time payment platform designed by the National Payments Corporation of India. Unlike more expensive payment options such as Visa and Mastercard, UPI is available to most banking users in […]
