United They Stand

Kind of old news. But it is great to see three top Telecom guys come together and build an unified infrastructure. Now if only BSNL plays ball with them, 99% of India would be covered and would enable further reduction of prices.

The biggest losers would be the infrastructure providers like the Alcatels and Ericssons since instead of having three customers they probably will have only one. Deals are going to be more fair since the vendor has to be flexible across the management of Bharti, Vodafone, Hutch.

What I would like to see though is unified customer service, billing etc. There should be one outlet where I can pay my bills whoever the service provider is, I should be able to reach one contact center etc etc. With number portability almost a certainity now, it is a good move by these three Telecom guys to usurp some market share from BSNL and probably even Reliance.

A year later!!

Today marks the one year anniversary of this blog.  If I were to have a balanced score card on the performance of this blog, I would need to separate it into four quarters.

The first two quarters were phenomenal and I achived what I wanted to achieve when I started this blog. Read more, learn more about the thought leaders and look at a path in attaining that status. I did not do much justice to this blog the subsequent two quarters and it speaks volumes that my most read posts are the ones I wrote in the first half.

Honestly speaking, being busy is not an excuse. Saunders writes regularly and he is the CEO for crying out loud. Though I would like to believe that I can get back to the ways of regular blogging, the enormous work load I am carrying right now speaks otherwise. I have stopped guest posting in Garrett’s blog as well because of this workload.I have not done justice to the Telecom Professionals Group as well for sometime.

I met a lot of people thanks to this blog and the highest point was a guy whom I interviewed for an opening in my company knew me from my blog 🙂

So I am going to give myself a A during the first half and a D during the second half and overall a C+ for the year. Have a long way to go!!!

Is Telecom for everybody?

News is that, lot of companies with different backgorunds have expressed their interest now that the DoT ( Department of Telecommunications in India) has decided to open up some frequencies for private players.

These companies are from domains like real-estate, retail even cement industry. Which begs me to ask the question. Can anybody with money become a Telecom provider. Now that companies like Airtel have shown the way by outsourcing the entire technical aspects of the business to professionals like IBM, is that the way we are going to see every other Telecom provider take? Throw in loads of money, have System Integrators like IBM do managed services and you just take your percentages.

You don’t require to be in the Telecom business for years/decades like it used to be. The entry barrier is just about money now. Which leads to another interesting question. Will all businesses become that way? All you need is cash and you just let the IBMs of the world run the show for you. Are we going to see the day when there are no more specialized companies but just SIs? Questions to ponder over.

PicoMobile

I have been hearing a lot about this company of late from atleast two to three sources. They are into the Mobile VoIP space and am interested to know more about their product and solutions. All the information I have about them currently is from their website.

It is very rare to see Telecom product companies in India and I was even more surprised to know that a company making VoIP/IMS suite of products was based out of Bangalore. If you are part of this organization leave a note here and I will get in touch with you guys.

TPG Meeting

As mentioned before the Telecom Professionals Group met yesterday in Cream Center ( a nice little place on Chamiers road,Chennai). This was  more of a goal setting meeting than a technology meeting ( Yup, Techies can try their hand at something other than nerd talk as well 🙂 ).

The meeting revolved around what we as a group are trying to achieve out here and how do we get there. As the first step, we are opening up our group to include more people interested in Telecom. You could be a student, you could be a professional in any other field. But if you feel you want to know more about Telecom and you want to discuss things with like-minded people, you are welcome to join. There is no membership fee as of now and all you need to come with is an inquisitive mind.

It was decided that some of us are going to blog at our TPG site on a more regular basis. People from various walks of Telecom are going to be blogging there and that is one site you would need to bookmark. Ram is in the process of creating accounts for some of us, and you can expect feverish activity on the site from early next week.

Also, we are planning to have one of us ( or somebody from outside) give a tech talk on Telecom in the next meeting and we are planning to make this a regular feature in our meets. This is something I am looking forward too and I will keep you all informed as to who the speaker in the next meeting is going to be.

These are some of initial goals we have set for ourselves and if this interests you can register to this group here.

TPG Meeting

The Telecom Professional Group in meeting today in Chennai at 6.30 P.M. Leave a note here if you are interested and I will get in touch with you and give you further details.

Its’ Proto Time!!!

Proto.in is back and is bigger. Another six more days for the second edition and though I am disappointed that not a whole lot of Telecom companies are presenting ( check out the chart in Kiruba’s post), it is still always a good place to meet people.

Last Proto was a major sucess for me personally since I happened to get acquainted with India’s finest brains like Vivek of Unleash Networks and Sachin of Drishti. It is because of people like Vivek the Telecom Professionals Group is taking up some kind of a shape and hopefully I will get to meet more like minded people this time around as well.

The event this time is going to be across two days Saturday and Sunday with top notch professionals in their domain presenting their experiences ( on Saturday). Every slot has got two presentations and am kind of disappointed because in atleast two of the cases, I see interesting presentations at the same time. Could have been better had there been no overlap. But then I am sure the organizers had their reasons for that.

This time around, I don’t plan to blog live. It was very difficult and I couldn’t network with guys. I hope the organizers are going to have video covergae anyways and I hope to post a link to that.

So this is it guys! For all you might know, this might be the last Proto in Chennai for sometime ( The organizers are planning it in other locations for the next editions.). So I am planning to make the best use of it. Hopefully most of you will as well.

Telecom Professionals Group Website

The TPGI website has been created and launched thanks to Ram and Vivek. Hopefully we will start posting relevant content and our vision is to make that site the one stop place for all things Telecom coming out of India.

High aspirations; but something we think is possible.

Telecom Professionals Group Meeting : Second Edition

The second edition of the TPG meet went off fine and some major decisions were taken from an administrative point of view.  It is getting more serious and structured and I see lot of exciting times ahead. The next meeting will happen soon ( I don’t think there will be any more long hiatus from now onwards) to decide the focus of our group and somehow I get the feeling that this is going to be the start of something big.

VoIP as usual was the center of attraction and Ram ( as he has mentioned in his blog remarked we were VoIP heavy 🙂 With more people from diversified backgrounds joining us, I think that will change soon. Ram has posted our group photo in his blog. I am not even going to try to capture what we discussed (on technology). Our discussions travelled through so many domains and you would need to be there to enjoy it.

Hope to see you guys soon for the next meeting.

Update* : Some more pics ( courtesy Vivek)

Vivek (left) and Chandra

Mahesh (left), Ram and Sharma

Venkat(left) and me.

Chennai Telecom Professionals Group Meet

The second edition of the Chennai-TPG meet has been scheduled for this Friday at 6.00 p.m. Venue has not been fixed yet. To know more about this group go here.

Anybody in the Telecom space who wants to join, leave a note here and I will provide further details. Hopefully this time around I will summarize the discussed items. From what I see, there are going to be quite a few administrative challenges which we would need to address.