Re: Airtel wants to pierce net neutrality, charges more for VoIP

At the risk of sounding like I am advocating the use of free market 
forces, I believe that one of the issues India faces is the inability 
for "any entity" to enter the connectivity arena. As such, enacting a 
common carriage on demand regulation would allow for more options, 
whether they be wireless or wireline in any of their permeations.

In other words, if every available backbone location was required to 
allow anyone to connect and take away connectivity, in the more 
lucrative areas customers would have a range of choices for their providers.

Instead of charging by the bit or individual service, the "Bill and 
Keep" formula seems to work reasonably well. This form of payment is 
based on "unlimited" service with such applications as voice and text to 
be free within that service.

Previously, I pointed out that enabling for profit competition becomes 
dangerous if left to its own governance as the end result is pockets 
with cheap and fast connectivity surrounded by swath of land almost no 
one wants to connect. As an aside, this is referred to as the "Swiss 
Cheese Effect" and can decimate one neighborhood while empowering the next.

In the US, we collect a nominal fee from each broadband user to be used 
for extending/subsidizing coverage in these voids. I believe this to be 
a very useful way to deploy broadband.

One more point, since I exited the wireless industry, almost a decade 
ago, the cost for equipment has dropped almost one order of magnitude 
while throughput has increased by at least that much. Creating a 
wireless backbone which allows for gigabit transfer is now almost 
trivial with the cost for last mile connectivity in speeds ranging from 
20Mbps to 100Mbps dropping to almost inconsequential.

Of course, all of the above required the Indian government to care more 
about connecting your country than the profits of an outdated service 
which is already bankrupt but hasn't admitted that fact as of yet. 
Sadly, all of the challenges are trivial with the exception of the 
regulatory hurdle and until that mountain is moved, most everything else 
will stay in stasis.


Respectfully,

Ken DiPietro
Cumberland MD USA

On 01/10/2015 04:23 AM, Tarun Dua wrote:
> "For the Internet, I believe the rates should be zero, because 
> monitoring, billing, handling complaints, sending goons to collect, 
> etc etc cost more than they bring in."
>
> +1 to that. The subscriber management systems are energy in-efficient 
> and the counting of bits costs way more than the bits themselves 
> ironically. A cursory viewing of BSNL's tenders and pricing received 
> per port for 3G/2G subscriber management costs should make that clear 
> to everyone.
>
> The cost of moving bits can't be zero or near zero but can definitely 
> be finite. In a recent response to TRAI's paper on broadband, Airtel's 
> provided the cost of fiber and copper pass-through per house and it 
> was hardly any different. Fiber can happily do 100 Mbit last miles at 
> no massive cost difference.
>
> Regards
> -Tarun
>
>
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