[_jgdh]

> They'll drop it as soon as something cheaper comes around.

My bet - nothing cheaper comes along. Because Reliance's biggest competitive advantage is close links with the government, regardless of the party in power. A hypothetical competitor would find it difficult to get spectrum allocated, have trouble with land usage rights, tax issues like Vodafone had.

There is a reason foreign companies set up joint ventures with Reliance, Tata, Birla etc. Ostensibly it's because these companies "understand" the Indian market. In reality, it's because they have spent decades "lobbying" political parties and will continue doing so for several decades more. A company like Sky wouldn't know how to get started with political lobbying, wouldn't be comfortable with outright bribery, can't make a long term commitment to staying in India. So they set up Tata Sky - they supply the tech, Tata supplies the connections.

[intended]

Indian telecom is now a classic oligopoly, far from our heady days as one of the most insanely competitive telecom markets.

[kamaal]

Well Indian customer is always a price conscious one though. Like it or not, we are that way. Remember those days people used to make pre agreed arrangements, and just make the communication acknowledgements though missed calls?

So eventually if you want to be profitable and sell more services, you have to offer a good price.

It's just the way it is. I even know people who look at fares and then decide if they want to take their own two wheeler or an Ola. Online food delivery works the same way. People hunt for deals and only order through that.

Sure some people pay for services. But those are generally rare.

[questionfor]

> Remember those days people used to make pre agreed arrangements, and just make the communication acknowledgements though missed calls?

Can you elaborate how did that work? I never heard about this method

[intended]

A classic example from a business perspective: Poorer users had no money to waste calling people up - but incoming calls were free.

So firms would advertize a missed call number on the radio.

People could give that number a missed call, and they would soon get a call back from the firm - thus never spending any money at all.

The more common interpersonal example was one person having more money than the other, or being on a company plan - so they would get missed calls from their family/friends, and they would then call back.

The cost was thus borne by the firm/richer person/person with more talk time.

[nsm]

Say you want to tell your mom once you safely reach school (via public transport). But you don't actually want to spend the money on a call or text (India did not have "unlimited text", at least when I was growing up there). So your mom and you agree on a protocol that "one missed call means I reached safely". Now you just call her and disconnect immediately. Message received.

[reachtarunhere]

Hypothetical Example: I would tell my dad that I'll give a missed call and let it ring just thrice once I got safely to University from home.

Actual Example from my life: My dad had a cellular plan that had lots of free minutes of calling. So, I would just give him a missed call and he would call back. This was the early 2000s I think.

[psds2]

You would tell me "if I am able to make it to the movie tonight I will leave you a missed call around 2pm" and then neither party pays for a telephone call or sms.

[bogidon]

We called this “beep”ing in Romania. Apparently it was widespread across developing contries [1]

[1] https://academic.oup.com/jcmc/article-pdf/13/1/1/22316427/jj...

[sbmthakur]

In those 'competive' days data prices were so high that most of the country couldn't afford it. And this was just because the existing companies had formed some sort of a 'cartel' and were not willing to part with profits[0]. All that changed when Jio entered the market.

0. https://www.counterview.net/2016/09/top-telecom-cartes-airte...

[intended]

Those are not the competitive days, those are pretty much classic examples of the chilling effect on our market after the SC forcing a re-auction.

An auction exposes market pricing information which was hidden before.

In case people aren't aware, the Indian mobile sector was one of the cheapest and most pioneering markets of its time.

People created the 0 cost phone call - farmers and mobile users could give a missed call to a number they heard on the radio, and then they would get a call back.

Stuff that was in sharp contrast to the mobile plans and service packs around the world.

While people argue about data, they forget how hard it is to set up the infrastructure and the massive boost forward simple phone calls were for people.

That was the era I am talking about, not post the SC verdict.

[masalachai]

> In case people aren't aware, the Indian mobile sector was one of the cheapest and most pioneering markets of its time.

Not sure in what way you mean pioneering but it was definitely not the cheapest! Everything cost money. Text messages, phone calls, data, roaming between states, out-of-state phone calls. Everything. All this in addition to the cost of the cell phone itself - no bundled offers with phone like AT&T did with Apple in the US.

Furthermore, you could get away with a connection from private companies like Airtel and Vodafone if you lived in a big city. Rural coverage by these players was notoriously bad. The only substitute available was the one provided by the government itself - BSNL - which got a reputation of having the "best coverage".

All that changed dramatically when Reliance came up with a Rs.500 phone which included a connection with free unlimited calls between two Reliance phones. That was the beginning of true mass adoption of cell phones in India.

> People created the 0 cost phone call - farmers and mobile users could give a missed call to a number they heard on the radio, and then they would get a call back.

This is not an example of a model working well. This is an example of a workaround to mitigate high call costs.

[intended]

You can check what ARPU and per individual costs were in the world comapred to India historically for calls. India has always been one of the cheapest places to have calls, and one of the lowest ARPU in any market - and it managed to get multiple mobile phones per person and has a thriving telecom market.

The 0 cost phone call is an example of the market working well - people at the bottom of the pyramid have no money to spend, and given what ARPU was, expecting even lower prices is the stuff of fantasies.

This is innovation at work. I don't know what people are expecting when what they had was already impressive for the time.

[enitihas]

Ironically, the prices are far lower than they were in those insanely competitive days.

[intended]

True, yet recently I recall prices being raised and all firms moving in lock step. A classic signs of oligopolistic behavior.

Further all 3 major firms are in massive debt, and after the SC interpretation of how they have to pay their dues, they are pretty much dead firms unless they get money.

You can already see them creating new packages to target users who have more disposable income.

I'd say make hay while the sun shines. The structure of a market dictates the strategies and tactics which work. With 3 players collusion is the norm, not competition.

[asenna]

I don't think Jio's game is to squeeze out revenue from the cheap data users. They've openly admitted to using Deep-packet Inspection techniques and I believe data harvesting is where the main long-term game looks to be for them.

If you're concerned about your privacy, it's usually known in India in the tech circles to stay away from Jio related products.

https://in.reuters.com/article/reliance-telecoms-jio/from-bi...

https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/reliance-jio-...

[enitihas]

What can any packet inspection do over https, since that's where the majority of the important traffic is,not to mention that a lot of apps use certificate pinning, so even MITM can't help analyse the packets. And all this is before eSNI becomes mainstream.

[midasz]

For now

[enitihas]

It has been about 3 years atleast since Jio has paid plans, and things are still way way cheaper. Even if the prices double, they will be way cheaper than what they were.

[intended]

Firms will just keep removing plans that help the poorest users as they work to get ARPU higher. This has to happen anyway because the major firms are under huge mountains of debt.

They cant be allowed to fall, because then the only name in town is reliance, which would be even worse.

What people are forgetting is that 1) Firms already raised prices and 2) that its not about data.

Its about a competitive market. We used to have this, and it even created the thriving VAS industry for a while. That died because of classic rent seeking behavior by telecoms over the VAS firms, killing that entire engine of ingenuity.

Telecom industries are know for bad results (see America, or Australia) when its not structured correctly.

Everyone who is focusing just on prices is unaware of the number of failures and missed opportunities resulting from bad telecom market structures.

Take Net neutrality, given the telcos way, it would have long been lost and rent seeking structures would have grown on top of it - it would recreate the bundled world of cable television over the net.

This means that poor users would never get a chance to look at products which compete purely on features and value - they would look at products that are "Jio Free" or "Vodafone plus", where having a hook up with the ISP is more important than features.

Looking at it in terms of "hey prices are low" is missing the great risk this industry is in.

[abhishekash]

My personal take is that for Jio the cellphone network is an opening to providing services that can be monetised in long run. Same strategy thats being followed by biggest tech companies across the world.

[enitihas]

That will not work that well. Average Indian right now doesn't really have that much disposable income for such services to be very profitable. It will have to be the very long run. I doubt either google or Facebook earn a lot from India right now, and they are very well established, and their compute costs are as low as they can get. I don't see how Jio is going to be able to follow the strategy of the biggest tech companies.

I hope India does grow at a large enough rate for such services to be profitable.

[dhanvantharim1]

Most telecoms in the world are,In Canada Bell Canada,Telus and Rogers own almost 90% of the market. When Verizon tried to enter the market the big three lobbied so hard against Verizon, even Verizon with all its capitol could not get in to Canadian.In the end customers in Canada are still paying very high fees for data plans anywhere in the world. Eventually India will get there.

[sbmthakur]

> Because Reliance's biggest competitive advantage is close links with the government, regardless of the party in power.

I think their biggest advantage is their cheap (earlier free) data services.