Vodafone Idea in Big Financial Mess

Vodafone Idea Ltd, the one of three private carriers of the country is in big trouble, mostly financially. VIL and Airtel is hit by 16 year old dispute with DoT, the AGR calculation, as verdicted by highest court of the country by end of October, 2019. As per Supreme Court, operators have to pay Rs 92,641 crore dues (breakdown = Rs 23,189 crore as the disputed amount, Rs 41,650 crore of the levy of interest, Rs 10,923 crore as penalty and Rs 16,878 crore as interest on penalty. Just about three years ago, the total dues were just Rs 29,474 crore). 

Out of this 46% would be from non-existing operators like Reliance Communications, Tata Teleservices, Aircel and others. 

JetPrivilege Rebrands as Intermiles

Grounded in April this year, Indian airline Jet Airways' loyality program JetPrivilege has been rebranded as Intermiles. Jet Privilege Private Limited (JPPL) was formed back in 2012, and was initially owned by Jet Airways. Later it was floated as independent company in 2014 and Etihad took a majority stake (50.1%) in it. 

After the grounding of Jet Airways, JPPL tied-up with other airlines to enable existing JetPrivilege members to use their air miles on these carriers for domestic travel.

Trip to Mysore with Itinerary (April 2019)

Mysore or Mysuru, is one of most popular cities in south India, located at Karnataka, nearly 150 km away from Bangalore. Mysuru is a historic place as capital of Wadiyar dynasty. Tipu Sultan was a ruler of Mysuru during late 1700s. Mythologically Mysuru was ruled by Mahishasura. 

We took a bus from B'luru to Mysuru at morning, reached the heritage city in 3 hours approx.

Stayed at Anurag Inn, booked via MakeMyTrip.

* These places are must visit in Mysuru!

Day 01 itinerary:  

1. Ranganathittu Bird Sanctuary* (Boat ride for live crocodiles and migratory birds : reach there early as they have limited boat rides per day)

World Gets 50th 5G Network

As China’s telecom trio launches 5G services in China, it marks 50^th 3GPP compliant commercial 5G launches in the world. As per GSA data, currently 50 operators are offering 5G services globally, in 27 different countries by the end of October 2019. Europe is most 5G dense continent, with 21 operators catering 5G in 12 countries.

The report also noted that 328 operators in 109 countries had announced they were investing in 5G. 

Joe Barrett, the President of the GSA commented: "I think that we have all been surprised by how quickly 5G has taken off, with deployments and commitments from across the globe gathering pace. This latest milestone, combined with commercial launches in the world’s largest mobile market, is set to lead to an explosion in 5G users and also have a knock-on impact on driving both use cases and innovation.”

#ShRT - DRIVE will Make You cRaZy like Hell

Drive, the latest one on Netflix, is another example how these days big production houses fails in bollywood as content wise they are big zero. Drive, starring Sushant Singh Rajput, Jacqueline Fernandez, Sapna Pabbi, Boman Irani and Netflix star Pankaj Tripathi, is directed by Tarun Manushukani and aims to be desi Fast and Furious but fails miserably. And just forget to tell you it's produced by Dharma Productions, i.e. the house of Karan Johar. 

Earlier I used to watch some shitty hollywood flick which are actually direct-to-dvd, Drive is a similar kind of bollywood garbage dumped on Netflix. 

If you can remember Bard of Blood, from SRK's Red Chillies is also a flop show. It seems these production houses make a really bad film and then they are selling it to Netflix. 

With such bullshit content, Netflix may loose Indian customers pretty soon. Well Netflix has quite good number of originals contents in English and their Sacred Games is a critically acclaimed webseries. Only thing they need to be choosy while picking up from bollywood firms. 

Fiber is Must for 5G - What Operators are Doing?

As the wireless telecom market went into consolidation for last 5-7 years, we can see only 4 operators in the market, i.e. Jio, Airtel, Vodafone Idea and BSNL (MTNL-BSNL merger is announced two days back).

Frankly speaking Jio is ahead of all, thanks to its backhaul assests which will also fuel its broadband dream as well as upcoming 5G venture in long run. 

Jio's tower arm, as it was spun off from main company as Jio Infratel in March 2019, is announced to be acquired by Canada's Brookfield Infrastructure Partners L.P. and its affiliates in multiphases. With 45000 towers from Reliance Communications, and another 125000 towers made by Jio itself, the total number of Jio towers reaches 1,70,000; which mades Jio Infratel as largest tower company beating Indus Towers. However 25% of them are monopoles.  (India's tower companies in detail )

Carriers Adopting Cloud Platforms to Embrace 5G

As 4G goes mainstream, operators want to be a step ahead of each others, and that cann't be done without technological advancement. 

Jio has been partnering with Microsoft for some time, and utilizing Microsoft's Azure cloud platform to cater the needs of local business. 

Vodafone Idea is also partnering with Red Hat Inc, to transform its network data centers to open standards. VIL will use Red Hat's open hybrid cloud platform OpenStack. Not only that VIL has also extended partnership with TCS for another 5 years, and they will use Business 4.0™ framework of TCS. 

Bharti Airtel is also optimizing the expenditure - recently they acquired 26% in AMPSolar Evolution Private Limited for Rs 8.4 crore to go ecofriendly, and to meet green energy needs and to optimize energy costs. Airtel is also gearing up to use 5G-ready Cloud packet core from Ericsson, which consists of virtual Evolved Packet Gateway (vEPG). This will allow Airtel to enhance network capacity, in the need of ever increasing data demand of Indian audience.