anandjm

Not sure this will count as flaunting my internet speeds. Do not have the speed test results. Will do so when I reach home. In the meantime the following are the details for my home ISP: Beam Tele (formerly Beam fiber) Plan: 600pm (inclusive of taxes) Quoted speed: 768kbps Actual speed: 1mbps (for last three months) FUP: 30GB (downloads only, uploads not metered), post quota speed is 256kbps for the rest of the month At my workplace depending on the proxy server used and

Actually started a separate thread about this listing the full details. But either someone deleted it or I was half asleep (it was around 1 am). The issue was finally settled tuesday morning. Filed a complaint with the nodal desk on monday morning and guess what on tuesday I hear the response that the bill is right. So I demand an explanation of the15 discount and then explained it to the person at nodal desk. This time she was convinced there was a problem. She went back to billing department and then reverted back to me with a refund. Anyway the whole situation left me pretty upset that for a simple billing issue of not more than100, I had to waste so much of my time. Looking back I wonder whether I should have ignored the bill, instead of fighting for my rights as a customer. Anyway I am attaching my email to the nodal desk detailing the manner in which my complaint was dealt with and which I also cc'ed to the MD. I was considering porting out of Tata due to handset registration issues, but hesitated because I always experience good support from TI's customer care. But after this incident, I really have no interest in continuing with TI. ps: moderators please remove/edit details not appropriate.

In the meantime, I thought of posting part of the official reply I have received in the evening from Tata Indicom MD's office which seems to be name "Customer Escalation Desk"

Just got a call from Tata Indicom Nodal office. I have been told that they can try to activate my MEID on 1xRTT only and not EvDO. I have given my MEID and AKey. Lets see how this works out.

I was wrongly billed when I opted for this add-on pack. My base pack was a 249 pay per second pack with 200Rs of calls and all calls at 1p/s. When I registered for this pack, the person specifically told me that for pay per second pack I have 90000 seconds of T2T STD. Instead some dumb-wits at the billing section deducted interpreted 1500minutes as 1500 units and gave a discount for 1500 seconds (Rs. 15). When I called the customer care, I was told that "add-on packs come into effect after the base tariff is used up" and refused to register a complaint. I was actually stunned at their stupidity for sometime and was dumbstruck. It looks like Tata Indicom has lost a lot of customer care personal over the last few months, because I never had to face such nonsense before. Either this or the company as a whole is suffering brain damage. Also wondering if anyone noticed that the former head of Airtel has moved in to head Tata Indicom. Probably this may explain the "billing" issue.

I did give the akey. I even spoke with the nodal officer. I was supposed to get a revert within a couple of days, but did not. When I called up I was informed that it would not be possible. So planning to shift to Idea or Airtel.

From what I know, if you registered the ESN with Tata Indicom before they started enforcing Akey registration, it should continue working provided you haven't updated the radio ROM or reset the phone to factory condition. However *228 will not work and so if you did reset the phone to factory settings, you will no longer be able to activate/program the phone through OTA. If you try re-registering the ESN you will get the error "AKEY Not Present In the Database.". I am trying to transfer my number from my existing non-RUIM phone to a new one. However I am unable to do so due to the same issues. I have escalated the matter to the nodal officer, and although he said that 99% it would not be possible, he has promised to try his best and get back to me in a few days, primarily because I am a postpaid customer. Just in case it would not work out, I am planning to port out to MTS as they are more than willing to register ESNs/MEIDs.

Are you still able to register MEIDs and ESNs with Tata Indicom?

I have provided MEID and A-Key, but the Tata person at customer care (who has been handling these requests) said he does not have the permission to add/specify A-Key and instead redirected me to the gray market. The people in the Jagadish market (a gray market in Hyderabad) charge around INR 1800 to register the ESN/MEID on Tata Indicom. So I asked him how the gray market people have more access to the ESN/MEID database than Tata Indicom Hyderabad H.O. He told me that the concerned person in TTSL office at Mumbai has not responded to his mails to register the MEIDs over the last few days. He even showed me the emails. So I just told him that I am planning to port out since it is cheaper than paying the gray market and even sent a port out request. I am getting very good CUG offers on Vodafone Postpaid for my company starting from as low as Rs 99 for 200minutes of local talk time and very good 199 PPS Plan for 9000seconds each of national V2V, V2O and V2L. So I am not losing much. Lets see how this works out.

Been experimenting on an HTC Imagio phone and been Googling (and Baiding) around. I am posting the link for ESN radio for HTC Imagio. You need to have an Hard SPL to use it. Link to HSPL for Imagio: http://whitestone.htc-unlocks.com/hard-spl.php Link to ESN Radio for Imagio: http://www.ziddu.com/download/14614425/6975ESN.zip.html I have been able to get hold of an RUIM (China Telecom) ROM for Imagio but I have no idea how to enable it in WM6.5. If anyone has any idea about using it, it would be greatly appreciated.

I have cooked WM 6.5.x ROM with sys version 23569 (6.5.5) using PPCKitchen. I have been using it for over 6months and find it to be quite stable. I have primarily been using it with camera disabled as it saves memory. Without camera the free memory on boot is 27-29MB. With Oxios Hibernate, I generally get 24-27MB free memory after 2 days of usage. This is with Activesync disabled. If anyone is interested I can post it on some file sharing website. You will need to have a hard SPL to use this ROM.

The main reason for more losses for Tata and Reliance CDMA service seems to be fewer port ins compared to GSM based service providers rather than more port outs. This seems to be easily explainable as people who port in will have to change their handsets. This could be the prime reason they have not benefitted much from MNP.

In case of UMTS networks, voice quality will be better. This is primarily due to the use of AMR-WB codec which allows for better voice quality in case of environments with background interference as well as conferencing related applications. The bitrates for AMR-WB can be as high as 23.85kbits/s as opposed AMR-NB which has a maximum bitrate of 12.65kbits/s.

The ASUS RT-N13U with B1 revision for 3G data cards is a good option since it does support a number of 3G data cards which are listed http://event.asus.com/2009/networks/3gsupport/ . You will need to specifically look for the B1 revision as earlier revisions do not support 3G data cards.

Sorry to bother you again, but I was under the assumption that MIN was a 10 digit number. Any idea when it changed to a 12 digit one.

I assume by 2K track you mean CDMA 2000. Correct me if I am wrong but AFAIK when CDMA based mobile services were launched in India, it was launched using CDMA2000 1xRTT and not cdmaOne. So where is the question of changing track from 2K. Also I do not think cdmaOne handsets are supported by Reliance or Tata (but then again I could be wrong). There is the possibility though that the initial handsets could have been based on cdmaOne but this would have caused a lot of problems for consumers even though CDMA2000 was backward compatible.

Had already posted a question related to this but my post was not approved. The MIN number of my HTC Mogul programmed OTA on Tata Indicom after ESN registration is not the same as the one on my old deactivated RUIM. So this raises the question - does the MIN number change whenever the ESN is changed or does it remain fixed. I ask this question because now that there are Akey related problems with registering ESNs/MEIDs with Tata Indicom, am I stuck with my Mogul till these problems are resolved?

I am unable to obtain call forwarding codes from the Tata Indicom's website and customer care is unable to provide the proper codes for call forwarding immediate (CFI). They insist it is 114 + <10digit phone number> for activation and 115 for deactivation. But this does not work. I am however able to use the international code *72 + <10 digit phone number> for activation and *73 for deactivation. Has anyone faced similar problem with Tata Indicom.

My mistake, should have mentioned that this is on postpaid.

Sorry for the late reply. GSM is on its way out being replaced by UMTS in most places. This depends on the service provider, tariffs and signal coverage. For basic phone usage it all comes down to which provider is better (not CDMA or GSM). For example, I moved to Tata Indicom because of its cheaper STD plans. I was a Hutch (now Vodafone) user initially when the prepaid tariff was better than Airtel. I changed to Tata because the number of STD calls increased. My postpaid bill on Vodafone was very high. It was cheaper for me to buy handsets and exploit the lower on-net STD tariffs of Tata which reduced my mobile bills by a factor of 10. I continue with Tata Indicom now just because I find it to have a better coverage in my area than any other GSM provider as well as lower costs. The SMS character length is 160. This is including the callback number and some other details. Anything less than this or more is likely to be related to the handset or the service provider. I do not think it has got to do with the CDMA vs GSM question. AFAIK Nokia still manufactures CDMA handsets but not too many. Their main focus is on GSM as their top markets are in Europe and Asia. They have a lot of patents related to GSM because of which their profit margins are higher. Qualcomm holds a significant patent portfolio as far as CDMA is concerned. Even in W-CDMA used in UMTS networks some report as much as 47% of the relevant patents as belonging to Qualcomm. I hope this answers your questions well enough.

AFAIK RUIMs can be used on GSM handsets as SIMs and they do indeed work but only for international roaming. The issue being that the service provider (Tata and Reliance) should provide the necessary facility for local circles.

Not true. The baseline speech that is used for encoding is typically a 16bit linear or alaw/mulaw encoded speech at 8kHz. This is no way close to an MP3 audio quality even at 128kbps. So the quality of the speech signal used for coding in either CDMA or GSM will be similar. EVRC-B is likely to be better than the currently used EVRC/SMV in CDMA 1xRTT networks (CDMA for short). However EVRC/SMV at the highest bitrate is inferior to the enhanced fullrate GSM coders. Since the capacity of CDMA networks is higher, the quality of speech in general is likely to be higher for CDMA than for GSM networks when there is sufficient traffic since fewer packets are lost or corrupted. If there is little to no traffic, the quality in GSM is likely to be higher. The main advantage of CDMA in my opinion is ability for graceful degradation and hence better capacity, better penetration through buildings, calls not being lost when there is transfer from one service station to another etc. Echoes has little to do with CDMA or GSM. Rather it has got to do with the Handset design and how the traffic is handled at the service stations.

What everyone fails to realize here is that Qualcomm also has a significant patent portfolio which covers WCDMA (3G-GSM/UMTS) technologies. In fact royalties from both 3G networks based on CDMA(EVDO) and 3G-GSM (UMTS/WCDMA) form a major chunk of their profits. EVDO is already a mainstream in countries like USA and South Korea, and the operational costs of CDMA is much lower than the current 2G GSM networks in India. This is one of the main reasons for lower tariffs on CDMA networks compared to GSM ones in India. I am not sure of UP but some states in India are fully connected by EVDO. Kerala is one state where even BSNL's EVDO coverage is quite good. As of now, EVDO tariffs are much better (lower) than UMTS tariffs in India and in places were both networks exist. Both technologies will continue to exist till they merge together by the time 4G networks are established or in the worst case by 5G. BTW, a) LTE is not 4G but rather 3.5G B ) correct me if I am wrong, but the issue of royalty payments were resolved in 2007-2008.