Arun

I just wanted to remind everyone who won a gift that you need to reply to the email sent to you on 29th December to claim the gift so that I can know where to send it! About half the gifts have been distributed by now. Note: Please make sure to check your Junk/Spam/Bulk folders also.

No spam. It was just merged. I have now moved "Reliance GSM" category towards the top (above CDMA Handsets category) so that everyone would spot the new category better.

Reliance will probably have to wait for some more directions from TRAI before implementing the internal mobile number portability. So it might take some more time.

Mumbai, December 30, 2008 Roll-out marks the completion of Rs 10,000 crores committed investment Reliance announces world’s largest customer experience programme GSM service to be available nationwide in over 11,000 towns through 2,000 exclusive retail stores and over 1 million retailers Fastest network launch covering 1 billion people within 11 months Project 6 months ahead of schedule. Reliance completing in 15 months what other operators have taken 15 years to complete State of the art next generation GSM network with digital voice clarity and India’s first nationwide enhanced EDGE for fast internet access Reliance’s No. 1 CDMA network is now supported by India’s strongest GSM network. With this, Indians will have the unique proposition of being able to choose between two nationwide world class networks Reliance Communications will, over the next few days, launch a nationwide enhanced GSM service covering over 1 billion people. A launch covering 1 billion people in 24,000 towns and 600,000 villages is by far the widest one-time launch. In India, this coverage is being rolled out by the industry over 15 years since launch. In comparison, Reliance's network has covered a billion people within 11 months, having received start-up GSM spectrum only in January 2008. Despite the scale, the project is running 6 months ahead of schedule. Compared to aging mobile networks prevalent today, Reliance's new 21st Century Network brings a number of innovations that our customers will experience over the next few days: * Next-gen electronics for super digital voice clarity * Seamless coverage on major railway routes, national and state highways through dedicated mobile towers * Access to a Reliance owned fibre network for unlimited capacity - both in India and overseas, resulting in unmatched quality on local, STD or ISD calls * Nationwide enhanced EDGE for fastest internet access speeds * Stutter-free video capability including 16 TV channels, sports updates as well as access to popular video sharing websites like Youtube * Widest R-World mobile content offering entertainment, music, news, cricket, bollywood, maps and search * One-click set-up and access to email and social networking offering communication convenience of a PC With the launch of its enhanced GSM service, Reliance's customers will be able to use the widest range of over 250 handsets and devices compared to any other operator in India. Reliance's customers can now roam on more networks globally in more than 200 countries - offering the widest choice available to customers in India. "In 2003, Reliance changed the face of the telecom sector in India", said Mr. Anil Ambani, Chairman, Reliance Communications. "Through our nationwide GSM launch coupled with Reliance's continued focus on our No. 1 CDMA network, we will once again endeavor to re-write the rules of the industry by offering our customers an unbeatable proposition across coverage, quality, service breadth, handset range and above all, value". For further discussion, please check this topic.

Source: Money Control Here is a verbatim transcript of Anil Ambani's speech at the press conference. Anil Ambani said that Reliance Communication will now offer a nationwide 'enhanced' GSM service. This nationwide GSM rollout will include over 11,000 towns and is expected six months ahead of schedule, completed in less than fifteen months. The company has invested over Rs 10,000 crore in the nationwide GSM rollout. Reliance Communication marked a turning point and changed the rules of the telecom game forever. It was the start of a journey that would revolutionise the way India communicates with itself and the world. Today, Reliance Communications is India’s largest integrated and fully converged communications service provider and we serve over 60 million customers on a worldwide basis. Today, we dedicate ourselves to Shri Dhirubhai Ambani’s vision once again of accelerating the transformation of the Indian telecommunications industry by now offering a nationwide ‘enhanced’ GSM service in addition to our number one nationwide CDMA service. Our nationwide GSM rollout has been a very large project, wherein Reliance has once again proven its execution skills. We received the GSM spectrum only in January this year, which is less than 11 months ago. Since then our network rollout has been completed and more than 11,000 towns and 340,000 villages will be part of our GSM offerings to begin with. Despite this enormous scale, we are at least six months ahead of schedule. To put things in perspective; what other operators have taken to complete in 15 years, we are completing in less than 15 months. This massive GSM rollout marks the completion of our over Rs 10,000 crore worth of investment programme. Our GSM network deploys the latest generation electronics, which will offer customers the highest quality digital voice. We are the first nationwide ‘enhanced’ EDGE network, a technology that would offer the fastest Internet access speeds available to Indians. Through our global partnership on both GSM and CDMA, our customers will be able to roam internationally to more than 200 countries on more networks at attractive rates. In summary, our number one CDMA network will now be supported by India’s world class GSM network. With this, Indians will have the unique proposition of being able to choose between two nationwide world class networks and have access to the largest handset range available of any operator in India, of over 300 different handsets. SP Shukla, President of Wireless Business, Reliance Communications said, "As you all know, and most of you have perhaps covered it, when we launched the CDMA national service in India, we completely redefined the telecom game. Our entry impacted all the five parameters, which one monitors in this sector, whether it was call rates, whether the very concept of roaming, handsets and the way they were sold, the explosive growth in subscriber base, and community formation. Video

Soon, undersea cable cut won’t snap your Net 30 Dec 2008, 0103 hrs IST Economic Times India could soon become nearly immune to the occasional undersea cable cuts that hamper Internet and telephone connectivity. Operators such as Bharti, Reliance, Tata Communications and BSNL are building multiple undersea cables that will enable in country and the entire region to enjoy disruption-free services. Undersea cables were damaged twice this year, slowing down services and in some cases, bringing them to a standstill. For instance, Bharti and its consortium partners are working on four new cable systems linking Asia to Europe and the US. Ditto with Tata Communications and Reliance Communications (RCOM) that are building four global cable systems. A BSNL- MTNL combine, too, will soon join in — the state-owned telcos will soon place orders to build two cables connecting India to West Asia and Singapore. The year 2008 saw two major instances where multiple undersea cables had snapped almost simultaneously, leading to internet and phone outages in the Middle East and Asia, including India. The latest incident happened about 10 days ago when three cables — SeaMeWe-3 and SeaMeWe-4, both owned by a consortium of telecom companies, and RCOM’s FLAG — were cut almost at the same time due to seismic activity in the Mediterranean. A similar incident happened in January when three cables — RCOM- owned FLAG and FALCON and the SeaMeWe-4 cables were damaged by the anchors dropped by ships. However, such outages may soon be a thing of the past, if one were to consider the additional capacity along different routes that will soon come into play. The biggest of these projects is the multi-billion dollar FLAG Next Generation Network being built by RCOM which when completed will cover 50,000 km and span 60 countries across continents. “The project is to be completed by fiscal 2009-10 to build the world’s largest IP network over submarine cable systems and will create capacity to carry 2.5 billion simultaneous voice calls, 300 million simultaneous web chats and 52 million simultaneous video chats,” an RCOM spokesperson said. Millenium Telecom, a JV between BSNL and MTNL, will soon award contracts to the tune of Rs 1,800 crore for the West Asia and Singapore undersea links.

Topic title updated

Reuters:

21 Aug, 2008, 2011 hrs IST Press Trust of India Government on Thursday cleared the policy framework for the commercial roll out of Internet Protocol TV services, a new cable TV delivery platform that would benefit telecom players as well as consumers. "Issuance of guidelines on IPTV will bring clarity on defining the parameters in which such service providers will work as also clarifying how these services are going to be regulated", Information and Broadcasting Minister P R Dasmunsi said after the Cabinet meeting on Thursday. The Cabinet also gave its approval to amend the Policy guidelines for downlinking of TV channels for allowing broadcasters to provide content to IPTV service providers, he said. Current downlinking norms allow broadcasters to only share their channels with cable and direct-to-home platforms. Modification of downlinking guidelines will enable IPTV service providers to obtain content of registered satellite TV channels from the Broadcasters. IPTV involves delivery of television and video signals over a broadband network. It uses high speed internet to deliver television channels but also other value added services like time-shift TV, interactive advertising, movies without any advertisements, games among other such services. State-owned BSNL and MTNL are already providing IPTV services across several cities while private players like Bharti Airtel and Reliance Communications are waiting to launch their IPTV services. Broadcast regulator Trai had recommended a higher foreign investment cap of 74 per cent for the IPTV sector in comparison to the FDI cap of 49 per cent in the cable sector.

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Business Standard Mumbai December 27, 2008, 21:40 IST State Bank of India, the country's largest bank, has had to shut down its corporate website after overseas hackers tried to break in. While the bank said that transactions took place through www.onlinesbi.com, a senior SBI source said that the transactions were slow as the entire system was under watch. The country’s largest bank decided to shut down its corporate website (www.sbi.co.in) on Wednesday evening when hackers blocked some of the pages. The bank also noticed unusually high traffic on its website on Wednesday. Subsequently, the website was blocked with a ‘service unavailable’ or ‘our site is under maintenance’ pasted on www.sbi.co.in. “We have informed the Reserve Bank of India and the cyber cell of Mumbai Police, which are looking into the issue,” said a senior bank executive. The police and SBI suspect that the hackers are based overseas. A Mumbai Police officer said that the cyber cell was investigating the complaint but did not share details: “It is big and the implications may be large.” SBI sources, on their part, said that no evidence has been found of loss of data or consumers getting affected. “We suspect that the hackers wanted some information from the website and disrupt the whole system,” the executive, who did not wish to be named, said. Out of SBI’s 2.7 million internet banking customers, 2.5 million are retail banking customers. In recent months, the bank has tried to push services such as e-trade and e-freight to lower transaction costs. As a result of the disruption, a host of transactions have been affected, especially since the suspension coincided with the year-end holidays. The sites are maintained by the bank’s information technology department based out of the SBI Global IT Centre in Belapur. The department has been put on high alert and the bank is trying to restore services over the weekend. SBI is the latest among Indian banks to face a threat from hackers. Banks routinely have to deal with phishing attempts and have over a period tried to sensitise their customers about not sharing details of their accounts over the internet. According to a recent report by security firm Symantec, there were over 400 unique phishing attacks on reputed Indian banks during the second half of 2007. A report by MessageLabs, another security services company, indicated that phishing attacks rose 16 per cent between August and September and shot up by 103 per cent between September and October 2008.

See the previous posts, it doesn't seem to be launching on December 28th

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It was working fine, but it wasn't notifying me since I was not added as a moderator. I have now made some changes so that all reports would reach me as well, along with the other moderators assigned to a forum. I have also merged those topics.

Obviously the coverage may not be as good as CDMA initially with any launch. The should be adding more transmitters in the coming months after initial launch. So you better check the coverage using any GSM handset (thats one advantage GSM has!) before getting a connection.

Yeah, after poking TRAI to intervene, Reliance got the inter connectivity from all other operators!

More winners have been added now since we have a few more contributors! We have a total of 60 winners now!

Issue resolved by having a separate forum for Palm Please use the "report" button if you come across any Palm related topics from other forums that needs to be moved here.

Here is the video of the CNBC TV-18 news about the launch of Reliance GSM service: http://www.in.com/active18/watchnow/watchv...p?autono=372345 Another point they mentioned is that Reliance is likely to start GSM service with pre-paid service initially.

It will be available in 20 circles after the expansion is complete, so most of India would be covered. Yes, definitely Gujarat. As you can see in the last update, maybe after the first week of January. Not until Mobile Number Portability is implemented. When? Too early to tell now. Maybe by mid 2009.

Update about Reliance GSM expansion launch: Excerpt from Siddharth Zarabi’s interview on CNBC-TV18: Reliance Communications wants to do a big time rollout of their 2G GSM network –– it was originally supposed to have happened on and around the December 28, the birth anniversary of the founder of the group but sources now seem to suggest that which is likely to happen only after that perhaps in the first week of January. It is expected to be simultaneous launch in at least 100 cities, Reliance has substantial infrastructure all across the country it is going to be affordable service and going to compete with all the established operators, so its going to take up affordable motility thing further, trials are on in several cities including Delhi with regard to network optimization and network running smoothly, we expect this service will be launched with a new brand this is not confirmed as yet but we believe the company is looking at ridging the entire brand strategy both for CDMA and GSM service but we will have greater clarity on this soon.

Reliance Communications to launch combined GSM-CDMA service by end of 2008 UNI Mumbai, March 6: Anil Dhirubhai Ambani Group-promoted Reliance Communication plans to launch its integrated mobile service enabled with both GSM and CDMA facility by the end of this year. The company will introduce this facility with both the telecom technologies through a unified customer support center so that customers will have convenience to access the sevice with a single handset, RComm Chief Information Officer Sumit Chowdhury told newspersons on the sidelines of an international communications conference , organised by Indian Merchants' Chamber here today. Asked about the company's mobile telephony expansion plan, Mr Chowdhury said, ''We are working on plans for complete integration of services and brands.'' He, however, did not elaborate further. He said that by March 2009 , RComm will expand its network to 23,000 towns from the current level of 10,000 towns. To support the RComm network in 23 circles in the country, additional 9,000 towers will be required, he said. To handle business of its telecom towers, the Group has already floated a separate company, Reliance Infratel, which is planning to come out with a mega Initial Public Offer in near future. Mr Chowdhury said that the company will also develop broadband access facility in 42 cities of the country and the numbers of Reliance WebWorld centres will be doubled within a year. Asked about WiMax services, Mr Chowdhury said that the company will launch its Wimax service initially in only 10 cities due to limited spectrum. ''Spectrum allocated to us by the Government is not enough ..... It's a costly affair to deal with, so we will proceed on the response from the customers,'' he said.

2 more winners have been been added now and the main post has been updated.

Here's a cool ringtone in MP3 format, supported by handsets like Nokia 6235 for your SMS alert tone... Excuse me boss, you have a text message ! Excuse_boss.mp3

Yes, mp3 format will work with Nokia 6235.