With a confident new generation of innovators, India now has the scale and self-belief to shape its own digital destiny marked by creation, observes Ajay Kumar chairman, UPSC.
Airtel has informed the government and regulator Trai that it has approached Reliance Jio and Vodafone Idea with a proposal for a joint initiative to unite the industry against rising telecom fraud and scams.
Critics say the programme, launched 10 months ago in India in collaboration with operator Reliance Communications, violates principles of net neutrality
Programmes offers pared-down web services on mobile phones along with Facebook' s own social network and messaging services cost free
Facebook Inc is launching an open platform for online content and application developers to join its Internet.org service.
Initiative aims to encourage more people to use the Internet.
Facebook on Thursday announced that it has shut down Free Basics in India.
Facebook is now attempting to make truce with telecom operators through its programme.
This puts an end to Facebook's Free Basics and Airtel's zero rating plans in India.
This is a significant move by Facebook considering the backlash it had from various quarters in India following debates on net neutrality
Mukesh Ambani, who took over the reins of Reliance Industries Ltd (RIL) after the sudden demise of his legendary industrialist father Dhirubhai Ambani, completes 20 years at the helm during which the company saw a 17-fold jump in revenues, 20-times surge in profit and has become a global conglomerate.
Tech and startup industry bodies have again pushed back against calls by telecom operators to bring over-the-top (OTT) services under a licensing regime similar to telcos, and open them up to taxation. Ahead of public consultations on the issue later this week, the Internet & Mobile Association of India (IAMAI), Nasscom and the US India Strategic Partnership Forum (USISPF), among others, have written to the government arguing against such efforts.
Meta Platforms Inc, the parent company of WhatsApp, will partner with Reliance JioMart for a service where WhatsApp users can buy groceries on the messaging platform from the Indian retail firm. Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive officer (CEO) of Meta Platforms, said in a Facebook post, "[I am] Excited to launch our partnership with JioMart in India. "This is our first-ever end-to-end shopping experience on WhatsApp--people can now buy groceries from JioMart right in a chat." "Business messaging is an area with real momentum and chat-based experiences like this will be the go-to way people and businesses communicate in the years to come," he said in an announcement coinciding with the annual general Meeting (AGM) of Reliance Industries the parent company of JioMart.
Apart from digital advertising revenue, both companies want to reach out to the 'next billion' Indian customers. After all, around half of the 1.3 billion population is still not on the net and this represents a challenge as well as an opportunity.
The company is to act as an ISP across rural areas for local entrepreneurs.
For Rs 39, customers can talk for 300 minutes anywhere in India and worldwide
Internet.org is a Facebook-led initiative
It came as a surprise to all stakeholders - competing telecom companies (telcos), most analysts and even the government's internal projections on revenues from the 5G auctions. Reliance Jio disrupted all calculations by paying a stiff Rs 40,000 crore to buy 10 MHz of spectrum in the 700-MHz band, globally considered a key band for efficient 5G service coverage, along with the default 3.5 GHz band and the ultra-high speed and low-latency millimetre band of 26 GHz band. So what made Jio pay almost 45 per cent of its total spend in this auction for the 700 MHz band - much more than what it rustled up even for the 3.5 GHz band?
Zuckerberg appeared on a video to personally promote Free Basics.
'No analogy is perfect, but a better liquid to liken data to is water, with the global internet like a great borderless ocean of currents and tides,' Facebook's vice-president, global affairs and communications, Nick Clegg, said in New Delhi.
We asked colleagues, present and past, to reflect on a man who has made such a difference to their lives and careers. Here it is then, a rich collection of memories that offer enchanting glimpses of the enigmatic Ajit Balakrishnan.
The programme has triggered a huge debate in India.
This will be Modi's second US visit after he was elected PM.
It is startling that Mark Zuckerberg has failed to convince so many in India about the merits of Free Basics.
Mark Zuckerberg said the company believes in Net neutrality "very strongly".
Facebook has launched an 'internet.Org' initiative
Zuckerberg says internet.org can co-exist with net neutrality
Trai chairman Rahul Khullar says concept not practised strictly even in countries like the US and the UK.
Telecom operators stressed that differential pricing for data is necessary for growth.
Close to $18 billion that Reliance Jio and Reliance Retail mopped up from a slew of private equity transactions in 2020 has pushed up the money inflows through this route by 108 per cent to $33.8 billion, according to an industry report. As per the data collated by Refinitiv, private equity investments increased 108 per cent in 2020 over the previous year, with the number of deals jumping from 665 in 2019 to 791 in 2020 at $33.8 billion, despite the pandemic. In 2019, total PE deals stood at $16.2 billion. Most of the fund inflows were in the third quarter, fetching $24 billion, which, however, tapered off in Q4 to just about $4.57 billion, as per the data from the agency that tracks financial transactions at a global level.
'When a Project Director is appointed, the whole organization -- including the Chairman ISRO -- works for his success. It is a lesson that has been of abiding value all through the other projects I have worked on,' recalls the late President, one of the earliest pioneers at ISRO.
WhatsApp's advantage is that it is the first app millions of Indian check first thing in the morning and innumerable times during the day and night.
DoT will have wider consultations with all stakeholders.
The Cellular Operators Association of India (COAI) has bluntly told the government there is no reason for its members to roll out 5G networks as they will be unviable if 'captive private wireless networks' are allowed to be run by enterprises. The COAI, which has Bharti Airtel, Reliance Jio and Vodafone Idea as its key members, has written to Communications Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw saying there is 'no business case for the roll out of 5G networks'. Permitting such captive networks will 'diminish the revenue so much that there will be no viable business case left for the telecom service providers and there will not remain any need for 5G network roll out by telecom service providers (TSPs)'.
The DoT report is expected by the end of the month.
Trai has invited comments till January 7 on its paper on differential data pricing.
Their startup investments number 13 so far, compared to 17 deals in 2020.
Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Tuesday said India is a very special and important country with a remarkable entrepreneurship culture, as he sought to push deeper the just-launched payments services that allow users to make payments over WhatsApp. Last month, Facebook-owned WhatsApp received approval from the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) for rolling out its payments services in India. In 2018, WhatsApp started testing its UPI-based payments services in India -- a global first -- with about a million users.
This will be in line with government's vision of Digital India.
TRAI said that Internet service providers would not be allowed to discriminate on pricing of data access for different web services.
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