chandramauli

Who was saying india is fastest growing market for mobiles ???

it went down to #7 ...

hi any !dea on starting a mini radio station where i can broadcast my songs (for free ofcoz). not something like shout-cast... but a tipical fm channel..

I have been a member long enough to know what this site is all about. If u use your eyes carefully this section is General Chat and says "Chat about anything else here !" I hope u dont need translation for that! 27627[/snapback] i apologize ... i take back my sentence.... cheers but wat i meant was that u did better logon to sites like www.gsmarena.com or other gsm sites to look for a better answer ....

A friend of mine is an Airtel Customer. He, like millions of other Airtel customers, has been facing the worst blitzkrieg of SMS Spam and pointless marketing gimmicks ever conducted in the history of India. I just did a little poll around the office to check how much SMS Spam people get from their mobile service provider. Let me define SMS Spam; any message which is not a direct result of any activity by you, or a change in the service provider's system and promotes something that you did not ask for can be classified as SMS Spam. So, if the service provider messages you about a mobile scheme change or a service alert, that's not spam, but if he tells you to go watch a movie, or download some new ringtone for Rs. 7, that is. Here's a result of the poll! Orange (5-8 SMS Messages a month) BPL (3-6 SMS Messages a month) Reliance (4-8 SMS Messages a month) (Sorry – no Tata Indicom users in my office) Want to know how much spam my friend gets from Airtel? 45 Messages a month, promoting everything from movies to ringtones, even shopping sprees! What's worse is the fact that they arrive at almost any time; even at 11 PM, or 2 AM in the night (over 30% of them), whereas according to the little poll I conducted, that's not the case with the other service providers. What's worser is the way customers are treated when they call up to report spam and get it disabled. First, you have to call customer service, navigate endless menus, wait for five to ten minutes to be connected to a real human, during which, they stream down marketing messages and advertisements to you (marketing everywhere?). Second, the customer service associates fail to acknowledge the fact that these messages are spam and that the customer never signed up for them in any way. Then, they tell the customers that their systems are incapable of "disabling" these messages for individual users; they're sent to everyone and that they don't see anybody else complaining about it. And when you ask to speak to somebody higher up who could resolve this problem, or take a decision on the same, they hang up on you. This has happened in front of me, three times in a row! Want to know something even worse? Airtel has even sold out their "Balance Check" feature. Try their Prepaid balance check service to see how much money is left in your account and they send you an SMS back, the top 2/3rds of which contain an ad for something or the other (for the movie Kisna, when I checked last), you've got to scroll down to the end of the message to check your balance. Overmarketing, you say? What crime have any of the users committed to be treated like this? Especially Prepaid users who have already handed over the money they will use to make calls (don't even get me started on the fact that Prepaid users are charged more, despite them paying their fees in advance)? Airtel needs to come clear and stop these horrendous spam tactics to generate revenues, else users will uproar, form a committee and take Airtel to the consumer court for sending unsolicited spam that affects their daily lives and makes it harder to read even simple things like your balance. Forget customer service; that's a different story altogether, to be covered in a different edit someday else. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- KEEP IT UP AIRTEL ... KEEP SPAMMING !!!! RIM please don't follow AirTel courtesy : Techtree.com The author of this post is varun singh. Log on to techtree.com for further discussions on this post.

strange .. i still haven't received spam from reliance.... the only messages i get from 1232 is regarding reliance its self ... that they have added news sites in gujarat (im from gujarat) ... and all which i think its ok ....

better u log on to some gsm sites... this site seems for RIM CDMA !!

cool stuff man !!!

can u please ellaborate on this statement please ?? how is "Only Reliance wants to put additional cost on customers(make money out of everything)" ????

cool man .. and that fellow who was supposed to make this for me said it would run upto 5kms !!!! anyone interested ???

I read this article on the net (businessworld site)...its interesting ... thought i should share it with you all ... WHAT WENT WRONG? Since its high-profile launch on 28 December, the Reliance Infocomm project has been plagued by unpr T. SURENDAR 1 2 In the first-class compartment of a Mumbai suburban train, a middle-aged Gujarati businessman screams into his Reliance phone: "I don't want free services. Charge me anything you like, but let me send messages." At the Reliance customer service centre in Lower Parel, nerves are frayed and tempers run short. Hordes of disgruntled customers land up from morning to evening to decry the Reliance service. Some can barely be stopped from getting into fisticuffs with customer services executives. Hundreds of Reliance Infocomm dealers, a.k.a. Dhirubhai Ambani Entrepreneurs (DAE), around the country want out and and are demanding their deposits. They say that the business is a lot less attractive than Reliance had led them to believe. In an interview to a business daily, Reliance Industries chairman Mukesh Ambani candidly admits that the DAE scheme has been less than successful. He says that the company is planning to cut the number of DAEs by half. THE first six months of the Reliance Infocomm rollout is something that Mukesh Ambani would dearly like to forget. When Ambani launched the Infocomm services with great hype and hoopla on 28 December 2002, the plan was simple - but audacious. The Reliance Infocomm services would be rolled out across the country within two months. It would offer tariffs that cellular rivals would never be able to match. It would get existing cellular customers to defect by offering always-on broadband Internet on their handsets - a facility most cellular operators would not be able to provide for some more time. And finally, though Reliance had the licence to offer only limited mobility it would offer customers full roaming anywhere in the country. (It planned to do so by forwarding calls via contiguous circles. Since it had taken the licences for practically every telecom circle in the country, in practical terms it could offer full mobility.) By offering this unparalleled basket of goodies, Reliance expected to sweep the mobile telephony market. In an exclusive interview to BW just before the launch, Ambani said that he was confident of enlisting 3 million subscribers by 28 February. (Reliance executives had told BW that the internal target was much higher at 10 million subscribers by 31 March). Ambani also said Reliance Infocomm expected to break even by the end of Year I. (Though they have been operating for nine years, only a couple of cellular operators have actually broken even so far.) Instead, in the first four months, Reliance has seen one thing after another go wrong with the Infocomm rollout. First, it failed to tie up interconnect agreements with other players as quickly as it had hoped to. As a result, the commercial rollout across the country had to be postponed twice - and even now, the Reliance service is fully operational only in 110 of the 673 circles it planned to cover. Second, the lack of interconnect agreements saw early adopters of the Reliance phone unable to connect or send SMS to anyone other than Reliance subscribers. And the Internet content that Reliance subscribers could access also proved fairly limited. Meanwhile, the cellular operators fought back with a ferocity Reliance had not expected. Led by Bharti and Hutchison, the cellular operators forced the telecom regulator to reexamine interconnect charges, slashed tariffs and launched an aggressive communication campaign pointing out the hidden traps in the Reliance pricing. As a result, four months into the Infocomm rollout, Reliance officials admit that they have not been able to meet the subscriber targets. Today, Reliance officially puts the number of subscribers it has managed to sign up at 1 million, or a third of what Mukesh Ambani had said he expected by 28 February. Sources in the Infocomm project though admitted privately to BW that the number of subscribers was actually closer to 600,000. What's more, Amit Bose (ex-Hindustan Lever and ex-Pepsi), who had been brought in as chief of marketing, has quit the company as has his deputy Shailendra Gupte (ex-Lever). Barcelona-based telecom consultants DiamondCluster International, which spent months researching the pricing and rollout plan, has left even as Reliance is revising its tariffs. So what went wrong with Reliance Infocomm? First, a small note: despite all the hiccups so far, the Reliance Infocomm project cannot be said to be facing a crisis. The current problems cannot even be considered a major setback for the group or the project. They are far more in the nature of teething troubles. As you will read in the story, the Ambanis are already moving swiftly to take corrective action - in pricing, in marketing, in interconnect agreements, in customer care. Their ambitions of dominating telecom remain intact. And their telecom rivals know that the Ambani threat is far from over. And yet, the kind of troubles that Reliance has got into with its Infocomm project is significant for one reason. Over the last few years, Reliance had built up an image of a company that could manage any project of any complexity without a single mis-step. The Ambanis had built up an aura of invincibility. And that is an aura that has got shattered. As an Airtel executive puts it: "Reliance has never faced failure publicly." In fact, the Infocomm project's troubles are expected to have maximum impact on the group's image, not its financials or long-term strategy. Back to the original question: why did the Infocomm rollout go wrong? While the Ambanis refused to co-operate for this story, dozens of interviews with former as well as serving members of the Infocomm project, and vendors and other partners of Reliance provides a fascinating picture of a project that was plagued by miscalculations on all fronts, where Ambani family confidantes and professional managers often worked at cross-purposes, and where the key decision-makers chose to go ahead with the rollout even when it was clear that all the pieces of the service were not in place. It was not any one big mistake - rather the rollout chaos was the culmination of a series of small mis-steps. The Initial Planning Mix-ups In retrospect, Reliance's telecom project had experienced a series of hiccups in strategy formulation right from inception. Ambitious strategies were drawn up and then junked, at least twice before the current Infocomm strategy was finalised. The first strategy, drawn up by high-profile telecom industry veterans B.K. Syngal (former chairman of Bharat Sanchar Nigam) and Ashwini Windlass (former vice-chairman of Max Telecom) was junked because it apparently did not find favour with Mukesh Ambani's close aides. Then, there was another strategy in 1999 that envisaged a partnership with WorldTel and a big bet on data traffic. That, too, was unceremoniously dumped when Reliance decided the cash flows would not be attractive. The final Infocomm strategy was more or less finalised in mid-2000 by Mukesh Ambani and Manoj Modi. The vision was a service based on the new-generation CDMA technology that would offer cellular services, but would be backed by high-speed optic fibre networks underground. The idea: offer cellular service at the cost of a basic service. The problem was that even when the strategy was finalised, neither Ambani nor Modi spent much time thinking about the marketing end. In April-May 2002, barely six months before the original launch date of September 2002, Reliance decided to start fixing the marketing and distribution problem. Since it didn't have much experience with retailing in the consumer sector - and since Reliance loved controlling every part of the chain in any sector it got into - the team decided to set up proprietary Web stores across the country. Hital Meswani, a cousin of the Ambanis and an executive director in Reliance Industries, was entrusted with creating a network of 250-300 stores by the launch date. Till August, the company had managed to set up only one sample store in Vile Parle in Mumbai. Meanwhile, the Ambanis fell back on Mudra, the group's advertising agency, to work out issues like the brand logo, the store designs, and other aspects of the communication strategy. In July, Mudra made actor Aamir Khan the brand ambassador. The services were branded Ginie - Ginie phones, Ginie accessories and Ginie recharge cards. In May, Reliance decided to pick up Amit Bose to head the Reliance Infocomm marketing efforts. Shailendra Gupte joined Bose in September. Bose and Gupte were professional FMCG marketers and their ideas on marketing strategy were very different from what Mudra had worked out. They commissioned Indica Research to do a detailed study to understand the demand potential and concept acceptance for the WLL services. The duo reviewed every bit of the old marketing plan - and junked 90% of it. The brandname Ginie was dropped. The Amir Khan as brand ambassador idea was dropped as well. Finally, Bose decided to downplay the company-owned web store as the primary channel for selling the service. They decided to focus more on the dealer route instead. Meanwhile, consultants DiamondCluster, which worked on the infrastructure rollout, worked with Bose to prepare a marketing rollout plan. In mid-September, advertising agencies and media buying agencies were invited to pitch for the Reliance business. The new launch date was now set for 28 December, Reliance group founder Dhirubhai Ambani's birthday. Bose and his team envisaged launching the Reliance Infocomm service like any FMCG product. They wanted the product to be available with 10,000-odd dealers on the day of the launch. They planned to carry out a high-pitched advertising campaign to attract customers. The marketing staff was expected to track the sales like they would for a soap or a shampoo and create point-of-presence (POP) aids according to local needs. Bose had begun the process of shortlisting the 10,000 retailers. By early November, all the 10,000 outlets that would hawk Reliance phones were identified. The plans were grandiose. These 10,000 shops were mapped on a geographical information system (GIS) software. Many of them would be wired with fibre and surveillance cameras and could be monitored at the Reliance control room in the Dhirubhai Ambani Knowledge Centre (DAKC) in Navi Mumbai. But one crucial piece of the puzzle was missing. The marketing team had no idea about the pricing of the services. Though a lot of people were encouraged to draw up pricing models, not even Bose knew how the services were going to be priced. That left the team short of a critical component to present a "final" communication package to the company. Says a marketing executive: "It was a frustrating experience. As the launch drew near, it was clear that even senior employees were powerless puppets." However, as DiamondCluster was working out a pricing plan, Bose and his team were confident that nothing much would go wrong. contd : on Page 2 other extracts from page 2 : How It Unravelled Almost immediately after the 28 December launch, the hitches began to show up. The DAE scheme was the first to show signs of strain. Just weeks after the DAE scheme hit the road, dealers from Pune were up in arms and wanted their deposits back. The Reliance scheme did not appear as attractive as it was made out to be. The dealers had believed that they would get Rs 400 for every connection they sold. Later, they realised that dealers who enrolled 100 or more subscribers were eligible to get only Rs 400. Those who got 10 or fewer subscriptions would get nothing. This was again because Ambani's core team wanted to recover the capital spent as quickly as possible. The dealers also found that though they had been encouraged to allow new subscribers to try out the service by making free calls before they enrolled, when dealers wanted to resign, they were told to pay for all the free calls made on the phone. Most dealers ended up losing money. Says a dealer in Dadar: "I started advising my customers not to subscribe to the service. I warned them not to repeat my mistake." Meanwhile, competitors hit back far harder than Reliance had expected. The GSM players united to push the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) to review and remove the interconnect charge differences between cellular and basic players. They also lobbied heavily for the removal of telecommunication minister Pramod Mahajan, who they perceived to be close to the Ambanis. And the new interconnect regime allowed them to drop their own prices and bring it to a level quite close to what was being offered by Reliance. At one stroke, they almost neutralised the price advantage of the Ambanis.[ Meanwhile, the cellular players (and even Bharat Sanchar Nigam) started going slow in inking interconnect agreements with Reliance Infocomm in the different circles. Net result: Reliance had to postpone its commercial rollout twice. And even after it started rolling out the service, it could only cover 60 cities against a target of 120 cities. Says an Airtel executive: "They underestimated their opponents totally. They won't be able to offer roaming services in a hurry."

hahahaha... u must be kidding ...!!!! well RIL isnt still taking corrective measures to improve on their part... i had been to an lg service point tp get my phone s/w upgraded .... 1stly the looking after the centre wasn't theere .... the fellow ther said u will have to wait 1hrs till he comes back ... (i said ok i dont mind ..coz i needed the s/w to be up\graded badlly..) 2ndly customers come, they are shocked to get answers like reliance is bad ..its reliance's fault ... (even if its an handset issue... they never claim responisbility ... ) god knows when RIL will take carrective action on this part ...

i know if i dont pay for the license to the govt and music companies ... i did be in big big trouble. ...!! and how abt a shout-cast ... on the internet ..do we need a license for that too ??

Ahmedabad: RelianceIndiaMobile (RIM) on Tuesday voiced its plan to cover 85 per cent of Gujarat by September 2005 in the second phase of its network expansion by adding 181 new towns to the existing 55. By the end of the phase the it expects to reach out to 65 crore people across 5,700 towns and 4 lakh villages by December 2005. Vijay Grover, RIM’s Gujarat head, said expansion would cover not only major places of general, religious, industrial, maritime and tourist importance but also connect major national and state highways and key rail routes. Commenting on the work-inprogress Grover said: “We have already wired 100 of the 181 new towns and expect to finish off the rest in a months’ time”, adding that, “The idea is to cover 94 per cent of Gujarat’s urban population and 16,000 villages and up the network coverage from 6.8 per cent to 85 per cent”. Reliance hopes to cover Dhuva, Bamanpore, Chitrasani, and pilgrimade centres like Gondal, Somnath, Palitana, Mahudi, Okha, Dakor, Chotila, industrial clusters like Atul, Palej, Sikka, Thangadh, Shaparveraval GIDC, Alang, Mithapur and port towns ofMundra, Bedi, Pipavav and Salaya.

i think this time, its for RIM users to trasnfer their phone bk to other rim handsets....

hey have u all noticed this ?? PhBk Transfer is visible in R-World > more services > tools > PhBk Transfer

Press Releases / 11 February 2004 Tel-Aviv, Israel, February 11, 2004 – Alvarion Ltd. (NASDAQ: ALVR), the global leader in wireless broadband solutions, today announced that Reliance Infocomm Ltd., a subsidiary of the Reliance Group, has chosen the WALKair™ LMDS solution for an access network that it is building throughout India. Reliance Infocomm is using LMDS technology to complement its Wireline and Wireless CDMA network to offer integrated services. Alvarion and Siemens Public Communication Networks (Pvt.) Ltd., India have been selected as the supplier for LMDS technology with responsibility of design, supply and installation / commissioning of all equipment. Over the next two years, Reliance plans to deploy Alvarion’s solution for last-mile connectivity throughout all major cities in India, using the 10.5Ghz licensed band. For first phase deployment, Alvarion has recently shipped equipment valued over $2.5 million. The Reliance Group, established Reliance Infocomm with the goal of becoming one of the world’s 10 largest telecommunications service providers by 2007. As the first stage in achieving this goal, Reliance Infocomm is now building a trans-India converged network based on advanced CDMA, fixed-telephony, and other technologies. It has secured necessary 10.5 GHz spectrum allocation in India’s major cities as the basis for its BWA network which will be part of this initiative. Mr. Werner Schachermeier, Managing Director of Siemens Public Communication Networks (Pvt.) Ltd., India, said, “We are proud to be part of this pioneering project, and to be deploying one of the world’s largest BWA networks. The proven price-performance and flexibility of the WALKair™ solution was an important factor that helped us secure the deal. We have begun first-phase installation and look forward to a smooth and rapid deployment.” Mr. Tzvika Friedman, President and COO of Alvarion, added, “We are delighted that our advanced technology will play a strategic role in helping this prestigious group become one of the world’s leading telcos. Throughout the world, established carriers have begun to recognize the logic of using BWA as a flexible, cost-effective complement to their wireline and cellular networks. This major project is another sign that BWA is an important broadband solution for unserved areas, a trend which benefits Alvarion, the leading BWA player.” About Reliance Infocomm Reliance Infocomm Ltd. is part of the Reliance Group, India’s largest business conglomerate. The Reliance Group contributes 3% of India’s GDP and 5% of its total exports. Reliance Infocomm was established to achieve the dream of late Mr. Dhirubhai Ambani, Founder Chairman of the Reliance Group, to leapfrog India into the center stage of the global communication and information technology space. Commensurate with this dream, Reliance Infocomm’s mission is to become one of the world’s ten largest telcos, and to be a key contributor in bringing India to a teledensity of 15 lines per hundred persons, as opposed to today’s teledensity of three lines per hundred, all by the end of 2007. To achieve this, Reliance Telecomm is investing around $5.8 billion in nationwide infrastructure projects. About Siemens Public Communication Networks (Pvt.) Siemens Public Communication Networks (Pvt.) Ltd. with a P1 credit and CRISIL AAA rating, is in the business of telecommunication network equipment supply, network design & installation and service support for Basic, Cellular and IP service providers, and telecom software development. The wide product & solution portfolio comprises Next Generation Switching, Optics, Access, Fixed wireless & IP Solutions, Intelligent Networks, GSM, Mobile data solutions (WAP, GPRS), Radio, Broadband, Microwave, GSM- R, Wireless modules apart from services encompassing related products and systems. About Alvarion Alvarion is dedicated to delivering seamless wireless broadband networking infrastructure to carriers, ISPs and private network operators, in order to leverage their broadband opportunities into sustainable profits. Alvarion offers premier wireless broadband solutions for access in the last mile, backhauling connection to the backbone and private network connectivity. Featuring the industry's most extensive range of products and international support, Alvarion is a pioneering leader of the converged wireless broadband network. With over 1.5 million units deployed in 120 countries worldwide, Alvarion provides secure rich-media networks for business or residential Internet access, corporate VPNs, cellular base station feeding, community interconnection, public safety connectivity and extended Hotspots. Having recently acquired InnoWave's wideband access portfolio and expertise, Alvarion provides a complete wireless solution that supports a wide range of frequency bands, customer profiles and service types. For more information, visit Alvarion’s World Wide Web site at www.alvarion.com source : http://www.alvarion-usa.com/RunTime/CorpIn...f=322&type=item

Reliance / LG / Samsung / Nokia all should have an entrance test system for ppl who wud like to become service providers.....

i spoke a lg service centre guy here in ahmedabad .... he said theres nothing like that ...come after april... i even wonder why reliance / LG appoints ppl who are not good at their job ... theres no professionalism, customer care, .... admins, please put a category for complaints too in rimweb.com ....

well i dont understand the idea for having access to yahoo and other messengers thru R-World, because you cannot access your phonebook, meessages and other applications when the yahoo and other messengers' are being used on R-World ... It should be something like a tabbed system u know .. like how we have 'alt-tab' to move to different application in computer...hope some manufactures develop such a system for phones tooo..

why only tele-marketing ... even spam should be stoped ... (by spam i mean adult spam mails should stop....)

Mumbai, Delhi and Kolkata are among the 10 most populated cities in the world, a United Nations Economic and Social Council report stated on Thursday. According to the report, Mumbai with 18.3 million people took the fourth place, Delhi with 15.3 million fifth and Kolkata with 14.3 million sixth. Mumbai shared the fourth spot with Sao Paulo in Brazil. Tokyo topped the list with 35.3 million people, while Mexico City took the second place with 19.2 million. New York-Newark area in the US was third with a population of 18.5 million. Buenos Aires in Argentina held the seventh position with 13.3 million people, followed by Jakarta in Indonesia with 13.2 million and Shanghai in China with 12.7 million. The UN report showed an increase in urban populations. According to the report, half of the world population of 6.5 billion lives in the urban areas and the number is expected to shoot up to 5 billion by 2007. The report stated that the population will increase rapidly in several countries in Asia and Africa but developed countries are expected to witness a 'significant' decline with fertility rates falling below replacement levels. source : rediff______________________________________________________________ cool naah !!! the UN guys are waiting for us to pick up more pace to come to the number one spot !!! (just kidding)

Watch Mahatma Gandhi in Italian Telecomunication Advertisement... http://www.epica-awards.org/assets/epica/2...m/flv/11071.htm ________________ it is a bit crazy because the westerners have more respect for Bapu and seem to understand his message better than us Desis. The makers deserve a standing ovation for their efforts.