Karthik R

CAG explains India's biggest scam to JPC Comptroller and Auditor General Vinod Rai on Monday appeared before the Joint Parliamentary Committee, which is probing the 2G spectrum scam, to explain how the government auditor quantified the losses in the spectrum allocation at Rs 1.76 lakh crore. Rai was asked to brief the Committee, chaired by Congress leader P C Chacko, on the allocation and pricing of telecom licences and spectrum during 1998 to 2009. The CAG, in a report to Parliament last year, had pegged the presumptive loss to the exchequer on 2G spectrum allocation at Rs 1.76 lakh crore. The findings triggered a political storm and subsequent events led to the resignation of the then telecom minister A Raja. "Today the talk is of a Rs 1.76 lakh crore scam. We want to know from the horse's mouth how he had arrived at the figure," Chacko said after the last meeting of the committee on May 18. Telecom Minister Kapil Sibal had dubbed "utterly erroneous and without any basis" the estimated loss of Rs. 1.76 lakh crore arrived at by the CAG on account of 2G spectrum allocation. According to the Central Bureau of Investigation's charge-sheet in the 2G spectrum allocation case, the loss to the exchequer is pegged at Rs 30,984 crore. Earlier this year, Rai had made a similar presentation before the Public Accounts Committee of Parliament on how he arrived at the figure. The PAC will examine the CAG's reports and table its findings in Parliament. Via : Rediff

I am of the same opinion.. But the blockheads at BSNL installs only those

Samsung is also one of Apple's main suppliers of components such as chips and LCD displays. The legal battle could therefore hurt the earnings of both companies as strong sales of Apple's iPhone and iPad mean added revenue for Samsung.

yep. Even better, Videocon mobile services offers the same for a month, for Rs.23.

@ SSK Dual SIM CDMA + CDMA mobile, if at all available, will be a battery hog.

The plan is not available in the following circles - Mumbai, Delhi, Gujarat, Assam & Madhya Pradesh.

Home town Very descriptive travelog and pretty impressive snaps of the countryside. Bookmarked it for closer reading later. Keep up the good work Aniruddha

Check out this Telecom Talk link Note : STD usage is capped to 400min/Month. Beyond this STD charges will be as per base rate.

Check out Samsung mPower TV S239.

Friend, even though the revenue from placing towers are handsome, in case of optimal location, please dont disregard the long term health hazards from radiation exposure.

We are leaving our laptops and desktop computers scorned in favor of a new mistress: the tablet. So says The The Nielsen Company - best known for its TV ratings - in new research on mobile connected devices. Nielsen asked tablet owners how their usage of other devices had changed since they joined the tab/pad army. More than a third (35 percent) said they use their desktop computer less or not at all, while 32 percent said they use their laptop less. Nielsen reports 77 percent of tablet users use a tablet for tasks that they previously would have done on a laptop or desktop. The most popular reason cited for favoring tablets is unsurprising: they're easy to carry around. Thirty-one percent of tablet owners responded that portability was the main reason for using a tablet over a laptop or a desktop. Ease of interface or operating system and fast start-up and power-off times were the second and third most common reasons given. Another interesting finding is that tablet-sharing doesn't seem to be the norm in American households - only 43 percent said they share their tab with others under the same roof, and half said they were the only ones using their particular tablet. As for the effect on other devices? Twenty-seven percent of respondents said they pick up their e-readers less often, and a quarter of respondents have cut back on their portable game console use. Tablet purchases seem to have the least effect on the use of Internet-connected TVs and smartphones. via : PC World, Nielsen.

Tablets will not kill desktops and laptops “We do not see the computer going away anytime in the near future. We want to remain committed to the Chrome project, and believe that desktop computing will essentially move to the cloud,” says Sundar Pichai, senior vice-president for the Chrome product range at Google’s Mountain View headquarters. Pichai, an Indian, is one of the top people in Google CEO Larry Page’s management team. Pichai leads the product management and innovation efforts for a suite of Google's search and consumer products, including Chrome, Chrome OS, Google Toolbar and Google Pack.

@Rudradeep Fly MV-115 and Videocon V1525 will do the job. Priced below 3K but not much feature rich.

Makes no sense buying this so late, when iphone 4S is due in a couple of months and 5 coming late this year.

Reliance Communications, which offers GSM and CDMA mobile services, said it added 2.94 million new mobile users in April. A company statement said Reliance Communications achieved the “industry’s highest new wireless customer additions in April, 2011”.

Kanimozhi's first night in Tihar jail DMK Rajya Sabha MP Kanimozhi's first night in Tihar jail was a sharp contrast to the hustle-bustle and media frenzy that she had been exposed to ever since her name surfaced in the 2G spectrum scam. Inside her independent jail cell devoid of an AC or even a cooler, she ate home-cooked food that she had got with herself and slept at 11.30 pm. On Saturday morning, she got up at 5.30 am and this time, there was no home-cooked food but jail breakfast for her. She had two slices of bread with aaloo sabzi and left for the court at 9:30 am. Kanimozhi, who is the daughter of former Tamil Nadu Chief Minister M Karunanidhi, is lodged in jail number 6 (women's cell) and ward number 8 in Tihar Jail. Her new neighbours include Madhuri Gupta - a former Indian diplomat charged with spying for Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) and Sharda Jain, a murder accused. via : NDTV

Thanks, helpful post

STV Rs.295 - Weekend Pack, which comes with 10 GB usage in weekend only. Validity 30 days and user can utilise the 10GB data in any weekend (Friday 10PM to Monday 7AM) during this 30 days. Additional usage will be charged @ Rs.0.50/Mb. Not sure if this offer is available pan India, verify the same.

Who all are in jail? Twelve people, including former Tamil Nadu chief minister M. Karunanidhi's daughter Kanimozhi and Kalaignar TV Managing Director Sharad Kumar, were in New Delhi's Tihar jail as of Friday evening, while one accused is in judicial custody in a hospital here and another has been exempt from personal appearance on grounds of ill-health. The first one to be arrested was DMK leader and former communications minister A. Raja. After that, the CBI arrested Raja's aide R.K. Chandolia, former telecom secretary Siddhartha Behura and Swan Telecom promoter Shahid Usman Balwa and his cousin Asif Balwa. The corporate leaders arrested are Vinod Goenka of Swan Telecom, Sanjay Chandra of Unitech, three officials of the Anil Dhirubhai Ambani Group - Gautam Doshi, Hari Nair and Surendra Pipara, who is in the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) - and Rajiv B. Agarwal of Kusegaon Realty. Joining the 12 Friday were Kanimozhi and Sharad Kumar of Kalaignar TV that is owned by the DMK. Cineyug Film's Karim Morani is the only one who has been exempted from personal appearance due to ill health.

Lithium ion batteries are nearing the limits of their possible power capacity, while the power requirements of mobile devices are increasing quickly. Something’s got to give. If your awesome new smartphone is to have any hope of lasting longer than a day on one charge, it's going to need more power than a typical lithium ion battery can deliver. Used to be, you could forget your feature phone’s charger at home, go on a long-weekend vacation, and--assuming that you didn’t use it to play hours of Snake--still come home with enough battery life left on it to call a cab. Today, though, we’re wedded to our chargers, and glare hawkishly at people who hog airport and coffee-shop outlets for too long. Switching over to superfast 3G or even 4G networks, as many smartphones will in 2011, is only going to exacerbate this problem; and reports already indicate that 4G devices tend to have pitiful battery life. In fact, the power requirements of the technology being built into mobile devices is growing at twice the pace of battery-capacity increases, according to one Verizon executive. But catching up with mobile power requirements won’t be quick or easy for the battery industry, and continuing difficulty may discourage public adoption of new 4G devices. Unfortunately, the problem isn't a simple matter of mobile battery R&D falling behind. It extends to the chemical nature of batteries, the way research and development is funded in the global market for mobile tech, and the many different demands users place on our phones and tablets. Constrained by Chemistry Battery technology and smartphone technology are at two very different stages in their lifespans. “Unlike smartphones, battery technology has been evolving for over a century, and is much further down the development curve, meaning that improvements in battery technology, while steady, no longer happen at the breakneck speed of younger technology like smartphones,” says Keith Nowak of phone and tablet maker HTC. Smartphone batteries are super efficient compared to batteries a decade ago, but they're reaching a limit. But aside from tiny incremental improvements in solid-electrolyte efficiency, lithium ion polymer batteries for handheld tech products haven't changed drastically in more than 15 years. Almost all of the batteries that power today's smartphones and tablets run on some variant of the lithium ion polymer battery--a cell in which the anode and the cathode are packaged with a solid, gel-like electrolyte (the substance that makes the battery conduct electricity). This solid-electrolyte design was developed commercially in 1996 as manufacturers sought a sturdier battery for mobile tech products. Previously, cell phones had run on lithium ion batteries with liquid electrolytes, which were bulky and relatively unstable. Today, battery researchers continue to increase the capacity of lithium ion polymer batteries. Since a battery’s power comes from its transfer of electric-charge-bearing electrons between the anode and the cathode, battery researchers focus primarily on optimizing the multitude of mini-transfers. “A lot of chemical reactions can take on a life of their own, and battery scientists try to control that,” said Irving Echavarria of Gold Peak Industries, a company that manufactures all types of consumer batteries, including lithium ion variations. Echavarria estimates that 80 percent of the processes in a battery can be accurately harnessed. And the smaller the battery’s window of errant chemical reactions, the more efficiently the battery will provide power. Battery makers continue to achieve capacity gains by pushing closer to that 80 percent efficiency limit. But the incremental advances in efficiency aren’t keeping pace with the increasing energy demands of smartphones and other mobile devices. Frustrated by the chemical and physical limits of batteries, developers who want to get longer run times out of smartphone batteries must either add active material to the battery by making the inactive parts of the battery smaller (a technique that has already reached limits of its own) or move from lithium ion polymer to a different, as yet not fully researched material. Venkat Srinivasan, a battery technology researcher at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, California, notes that, “the physics that dictates evolution in batteries is different from the physics that dictates evolution in smartphone electronics.” It seems that batteries are doomed to drag along behind the wagon train until a Eureka moment happens occurs with a better material. New Ideas Coming, Slowly Small signs of innovation are visible on the battery-life horizon. The unanswered questions are how quickly they’ll emerge, and whether the technology involved will be scalable to serve the entire mobile world. Lithium ion research continues in the R&D labs of many consumer-battery makers. And university labs across the country have churned out paper after paper on the possibilities of graphene, a single-atom-thick sheet of graphite that has the potential to store and transmit energy (though any use of graphene for consumer batteries is still a long way off). But the U.S. government (like many other national governments) has provided almost no funding for consumer battery research, instead putting money into research for vehicle and military-use batteries. It’s Not Just the Battery, Though Designing a mobile device is no longer just about perfecting its computing power, design, and user interface; it’s about doing all those things with far less power. At some point, consumers’ desire for faster data plans and monster multitasking capabilities will be overtaken by the simple need for a device that can remain in operation for at least one full workday. Smartphone screens are getting larger and supporting higher resolutions, both of which su*k power like crazy. Lowering your screen's brightness might help eke a few extra minutes out of your battery, but Apple, HTC, Motorola, and other major phone manufacturers are unlikely to move to smaller or duller screens anytime soon. Nevertheless, some (including Samsung and LG Electronics) are focusing on making new types of displays that are no dimmer but use less power. Another major power drain relates to increasingly complex apps, which impose ever-steeper processing requirements. Most smartphones contain Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and GPS radios inside, and in many instances these components operate simultaneously. The GPS radio, in particular, is a notorious battery killer: You can see the battery bar getting shorter as you run your navigation app. Newer phones add a 4G radio chipset, which requires a lot more processing power to decode far greater amounts of data encoded in the LTE wireless spectrum. On top of all that, new 4G phones have two different chip sets, to connect with a 4G spectrum and with the carrier’s older 3G network. As a result, you can count on your battery to deliver only about a day of juice to your phone, if you're lucky. One consequence of runaway power consumption is that the makers of mobile processors are feeling a lot of pressure to produce more-efficient chips for phones. James Bruce, an executive at ARM, which develops and licenses processors for almost all mobile devices in the world, explains that phone hardware is much more battery-efficient today than it was when phones lasted longer, but "the difference between a Nokia [feature phone] and a smartphone today is that there just wasn’t enough there for people to keep using their phones all day." Dual Cores Will Help The dual-core processors (made by ARM) that have shown up in a few 2011 smartphones (auch as the HTC Droid Bionic and the Motorola Atrix 4G) may offer some hope. According to Bruce, "dual-core” phones can delegate simple tasks to one core, while directing more-complex (and more-power-hungry) tasks to the other core. As Bruce explains, if the phone is doing only simple tasks--such as sending text messages or running the calculator--on one core, the other core can power down, thereby saving battery life. The idea that more cores could be the secret to using less battery power may seem a little counterintuitive, but ARM isn’t the only company trying to solve the problem of too-short battery life in that way. At the beginning of May, a company called Adapteva announced their new "Epiphany Microprocessor," which they hope to place in smartphones and tablets alongside ARM dual-core processors. Adapteva’s new processor can accommodate up to 64 cores on a smartphone chip. While planting a 64-core chip in a smartphone sounds like the opposite of a power-saving measure, Andreas Olofsson, CEO and founder of the company, says that most smartphones today run a scaled-down, power-hungry version of a desktop processor to connect to the Internet, run games, and play music. The Epiphany processor, on the other hand, is a chip optimized for performing specific parts of general commands in tandem with the phone’s CPU (which does all of the phone’s general processing). The processor can streamline the offline duties of the phone to make gesture and facial recognition faster, for example. Olofsson says that this design could "put the power of a laptop in a smartphone today." It’s the Apps Smartphone apps are the final culprit in our rogues' gallery of smartphone battery killers (with the physical limits of batteries ranking as the first culprit). An app's power usage is one of the things Apple examines when deciding whether to approve an app for sale at the App Store. “[Apple] wouldn't let you intentionally ruin battery life, like if you were running a game that didn't require GPS, they would reject the app if it was pinging a GPS signal every 10 seconds,” says Cameron Vanga, a developer with iPhone app maker 9magnets. Though the Android app market might harbor a larger number of potential power-su*king apps, more-established developers usually make an effort not to use more battery life than they need to get the app to function properly, for fear of receiving low ratings or having users delete the app. “Beyond maybe GPS applications, most users are good at correlating which apps are going to kill battery,” Vanga notes. Most smartphone users are okay with taking their phones out for the day and then plugging them in to a charger each night, but battery makers are going to have to step up soon to deal with the voracious appetites of the miniature computers that everyone is relying on more and more every day. If innovation in battery technology doesn’t pick it up a little, the breakneck speed at which mobile tech innovation has been racing along could come crashing to a halt against a usability wall. Courtesy : PC World

Trai may get more powers, to function as civil court The communications ministry plans to grant more powers to the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) that will enable the watchdog to act like a civil court. The move will bring Trai on a par with the Securities and Exchange Board of India and the Competition Commission of India and allow it to "summon persons, examine them on oath, demand documents and evidence on affidavits and, in appropriate cases, call for expert assistance in conducting inquiries", the Department of Telecom (DoT) said in an internal note reviewed by ET. DoT has sought legal advice on the issue. This is the first time Trai has received a favourable response from the ministry on its demand for more teeth. Its similar requests were earlier spurned by former telecom ministers A Raja and Dayanidhi Maran. Via : economic Times

Raja on TIME’s List of Top Power Abuses Former Indian telecom minister A. Raja’s alleged lowball pricing of mobile phone spectrum at the behest of his corporate pals is arguably India’s biggest corruption scandal. But should it really be considered among the top all-time abuses of power in the world? TIME magazine has a new list of the “Top 10 Abuses of Power” and it puts Mr. Raja’s so-called 2G scam at No. 2, just behind the “Watergate” scandal that shook American politics and brought down President Richard Nixon in 1974. We at India Real Time think that is a big stretch and is an example of the hyperbole that often surrounds the “2G” spectrum case. The dodgy Indian spectrum sale of 2008 led to several billion dollars in lost potential revenue for the Indian treasury, according to Indian investigators. No one really knows how much the spectrum would have been worth in an auction, and neither investigators nor the media has yet been able to show how much bribe money was paid out to Mr. Raja or his associates. Moreover, it may be a bit early to add Mr. Raja to such a list, given that India’s legal system has yet to render its verdict on him. Mr. Raja, who denies wrongdoing, is facing trial on criminal charges of conspiracy, cheating and forgery. We’re not minimizing the 2G case by any means. Taxpayers should be infuriated if lucrative public airwaves were dealt on the cheap to someone’s cronies. That is indeed a scandal. But if we’re talking about the Global Hall of Infamy here, one would think TIME would include on the list – well ahead of Mr. Raja – the despots and strongmen of Asia, Africa and the Middle East who have verifiably looted their nations and lined their pockets with cash while taking care of their families too. Nowhere on the list, for example, is Indonesia’s former President Suharto, who Transparency International has said misappropriated between $15 billion to $35 billion in state funds during his 32-year rein. This wasn’t lost potential state revenue. These were assets directly controlled by Suharto and his family. (Ironically, it was TIME whose 1999 article helped expose the staggering scale of the Suharto family’s fortune in “cash, property, art, jewelry and jets.” Also not making the cut in TIME’s list: Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines and Mobutu Sese Soko, who amassed about $5 billion in wealth over three decades in Zaire (modern-day Congo), according to Transparency. It’s not even clear that Mr. Raja’s funny business with frequencies is the worst-ever abuse of power in India. Some Indians might nominate former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s imposition of emergency rule from 1975 to 1977, when the government halted elections, suspended civil liberties and cracked down on political opposition. It’s hard to tell what TIME’s criteria were for this list. It apparently isn’t limited to government officials, since No. 3 is Dennis Kozlowski and his weirdly opulent lifestyle as CEO of Tyco (when he used corporate funds for such lavish items as a $6,000 shower curtain). There are so many corporate chieftains who have broken trust with shareholders or investors – from the management of Enron to Bernie Madoff’s ponzi scheme – that it’s hard to know why Mr. Kozlowski was singled out. In the realm of corruption, the Chinese food safety tsar who took bribes to let substandard products into the market is No. 9. There are also several sex scandals on the list, including Italian premier Silvio Berlusconi’s “bunga bunga” parties and his alleged payment for sex to an under-aged Moroccan woman; and the coerced concubines of North Korean despot and “Dear Leader” Kim Jong Il. There’s no mention of what is arguably the biggest U.S. sex scandal, former President Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky. If this is supposed to be a ranking of abuses of power, sex scandals would seem relatively minor compared to dictators who have committed genocides on their populations or otherwise used the state’s might to attack political opposition. There are numerous such examples. We assume that TIME decided human rights abuses shouldn’t be factored into this particular list. Regardless, it is hard to see how the loss of potential revenue – even a huge amount – from the sale of mobile phone frequencies in India qualifies as the second-worst abuse of power in the world. Not to minimize what Mr. Raja is accused of but sadly there have been much worse abuses of power than that. Via : Wall Street Journal

Jail for Kanimozhi as court rejects bail plea NEW DELHI: DMK MP Kanimozhi and Kalaignar TV chief Sharad Kumar, named as co-conspirators in the 2G spectrum scam, were on Friday taken into custody after a special Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) court rejected their bail pleas. CBI special judge O.P. Saini said: "Both the bail applications (of Kanimozhi and Sharad Kumar) are dismissed. As per the court orders, they are to be taken into custody." Kanimozhi, who was accompanied in court by her husband Aravindan and was clad in an orange salwar-kurta, tried to regain her composure after the judgment was pronounced and later told her supporters that "she was expecting the decision". Her security guard burst into tears as the judge announced his decision. The CBI had named Kanimozhi, daughter of DMK chief M. Karunanidhi, and Sharad Kumar as co-conspirators in its April 25 supplementary chargesheet after it traced an illegal money trail of Rs.214 crore in the scam. As the judge pronounced the verdict, co-accused -- and former communications minister -- A. Raja looked shocked. The DMK MP is already in jail in connection with the case, related to irregularities in the allocation of airwaves to telecom companies that caused huge losses to the exchequer. She has been charged under the Prevention of Corruption Act for taking bribe through Kalaignar TV -- a channel run by DMK -- in which a sum of Rs 200 crore was routed from Shahid Usman Balwa's firm DB Realty. Kanimozhi and Kumar had appeared in court in the morning and were told that the decision on their bail pleas would be made after 1 pm. The hearing was then adjourned till 2.30 pm. Also present in the courtroom on Friday were former telecom secretary Siddharth Behura, Swan Telecom promoter Shahid Balwa, Raja's aide R.K. Chandolia, Vinod Goenka of Swan Telecom and Sanjay Chandra of Unitech. Two officials of ADAG, Gautam Doshi and Hari Nair, who were also named in the charge sheet, were present in the courtroom. Cineyug Film's Karim Morani was not present as he got exemption from personal appearance due to his ill health, while Surendra Pipara of Reliance, who is in judicial custody, was also not present in the court as he is undergoing treatment for a heart problem at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS). Kalaignar TV channel had earlier stated that the Rs.214 crore it got was a loan and paid back with interest. Via : Times of India

Lab results Our very own RIL in partnership with Qualcomm, conducted its tests in its backyard at Reliance Corporate Park, Navi Mumbai, last year. The tests, conducted in a complete ecosystem using Ericsson’s global expertise, demonstrated balanced peak speeds of 80 mbps in the downlink and 20 mbps in the uplink. Of course, these are more than dream-come-true speeds for a still 3G-deprived country at far. But expect the speeds to be around 8-12 mbps at the max in real world conditions, when LTE gets fully commercialised and more users will bog down the network.