SO the BIG Brother has retuned back ! The plans to shake the telecom industry has banged millions of doors!! Digital India , 4G LTE ,Data revolution ,PM endorsing JIO, FREE VOICE Calls ,”BIG CAT -DOG” fights amongst the industry ..
What the hell is going on from past 10 days, what’s the rampage all about? Chill on!! Here comes a detail beginning of a “form of CASE STUDY” (but in continuation wrt the future of JIO) .
Sneak from the past:
Reliance has always been into most of the money making business, believing in horizontal expansion! It was in Dec 2002 when Reliance Infocomm (by Mukesh Ambani) launched their Pan India CDMA service (22 Circles) in India under the deemed leadership of Late. Dhirubhai Ambani(whose dream of digitization was nurtured but he couldn’t acknowledge the launch due to his demise in July 2002).
Within 6 months of their launch ,a tremor occurred in the name of “Monsoon Hungama”, on July1 ,wherein Instant multimedia mobile phone and connection was being offered for just Rs 501.
This actually created a hungama & it set a record of acquiring over one million customers in just 10 days! (A report from Pune quoted “this scheme continued to draw crowds, even when half –a million people had signed for this scheme in a week .From collegians to riksha wallah’s to carpenters ,all could be seen outside their stores to “Go mobile” , “The 501 HYPE” …See the Frame ,today is the same “THE FREE VOICE & DATA HYPE”:)
Well , post this there was no turning back for Reliance Infocomm ,but the family feud led to the division of Reliance umpire & exit of Mukesh Ambani from telecom , a venture which he had started & revolutionized the industry with cheap tariff & handsets ! But he was forced by the non-compete clause in their agreement (between the brothers) ,which refrained him for this long to re-enter & jolt up the industry & throw a wind of digitization in India. This clause ended in 2010 & then Mukesh Ambani surged back in highly planned manner.
He bought 95% stake in “Infotel broadband” for Rs 4800Cr which won major 4G Broadband spectrum in all 22 circles in 2010 Spectrum auctions , thereby marking his BIG entry back into Telecom!
And ,why not ,with a massive PAT on RIL ,he had enough to invest in a leading technology which had already begun around the world from 2009 (LTE services first launched publicly in Oslo in 2009 & then in 2010/2011 LTE had spread across the world’s leading countries ,along with LTE handsets (Samsung Galaxy Induge 1st LTE Smart Phone in 2011)
Now what this LTE is all about?
Not planning to pen down a “technology purview”, but trying to enable the layman understanding!
There are many types of cellular services, Cellular network/telephony is a radio-based technology wherein radio waves are the electromagnetic waves that antennas propagate.
Cellular Network/telephony has been described in terms of generations:
0G:Briefcase-size mobile radio telephones
1G: Analog cellular telephony, introduced in 1980’s, with speed upto 2.4Kbps
- Poor Voice quality ,poor Battery Life ,large phone sizes ,No security
2G: Digital cellular telephony: 2G was coined as GSM ,a European standard deployed in the early 1990’s , avg. data download rate :65kbps
2G GSM can provide services as
- Voice calls
- SMS ,MMS ,Picture messages
- 2G was unable to handle complex Data ,hence evolved 2.5G
2.5G: Technology between 2G & 3G (2G with GPRS) , avg. data download rate : 65-144kbps
- GPRS – IP-based packet data transmission
- Users can “simultaneously” make calls and send data (browsing ,audio, video messages)
- Send Receive E-Mail
- All text messages are digitally encrypted But again it set a limitation wrt good quality Video’s ,games which resulted in further advancement.
3G: High-speed digital cellular telephony (including video telephony) , avg.data download rate :20Mbps (highly ideal situation)
- Enables use of Video calls ,GPS ,Mobile television with better bandwidth & increased speed
- Drawbacks were :
- Complex infrastructure for 3G ,enhancing the costs
- High bandwidth requirements
4G: IP-based “anytime, anywhere” voice, data, and multimedia telephony at faster data rates than 3G , data download rate :100Mbps -1Gbps (highly ideal situation)
The basic difference between 3G &4G is just the Data transmission speed, Signal quality.
So now where does this LTE lies ? Commonly marketed as 4G LTE , actually none of the operators across the world have met the set speed of 1Gbps by ITU-R ,since those speeds were unheard off in a practical world with so many parameters into account for irrespective of the money tech cos. had put into.
A rapid increase of mobile data usage and emergence of new applications such as MMOG (Multimedia Online Gaming), mobile TV, Web 2.0, streaming contents had motivated the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) to work on the Long-Term Evolution (LTE) on the way towards fourth-generation mobile (True 4G).
Hence the regulator coded the term LTE, a technology that could be labeled as 4G if it provided significant improvement over 3G & as of now LTE is the fastest wireless network available across the world (with data Rate as 100Mbps download & 50Mbps Upload)
LTE stands for Long Term Evolution and it was started as a project in 2004 by telecommunication body known as the Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP),in short it is next generation of Mobile Broadband technology.
Advantages:
- It brings up to 50 times performance improvement and much better spectral efficiency to cellular networks ,simple architecture (hence Cost effective)
- Ideal technology to support high data rates in both downlink & Uplink for the services such as voice over IP (VOIP), streaming multimedia, videoconferencing.
- Very low Latency : Time required to connect to a network is just 10 milliseconds (don’t fall in for call drops in JIO ,that’s a separate issue)
- LTE is designed with a scalable carrier bandwidth from 1.4 MHz up to 20 MHz ,which bandwidth is used depends on the frequency band and the amount of spectrum available with a network operator
Packet switching or Circuit switching:
2G /3G technologies used circuit switching in which the connection (call/file transfer) is established directly to the target via the network, which makes it a faster connection.
LTE uses Packet switching with its all IP network, in which the information is broken into small packets which travel through the most efficient path & get transmitted.
Eg. Quoting the difference for understanding:
Circuit switching: Word “Technology” is to be transmitted ,complete word will flow ,in case a node is lost /drops off the connection ,one needs to reconnect .
Packet switching : “Technology” word will be transmitted as say – Tech – No-Lo –Gy ,so if the node drops off here (at Tech end suppose) ,second packet –“No” will search different path & the user may at the end hear : Nology ,but one will not need to re-connect.
Another important point is voice calls in GSM, UMTS and CDMA2000 are circuit switched, so with the adoption of LTE, carriers will have to re-engineer their voice call network, so the approaches are :
- VoLTE : Voice over LTE as in Skype or Whats app calls ,but it takes away the Data & prone to less battery life ,RJIO uses VoLTE which perfectly works well with other mobile operators networks.
- Circuit-switched fallback (CSFB) : LTE just provides data services, and when a voice call is to be initiated or received, it will fall back to the circuit-switched domain. When using this solution, operators just need to upgrade the MSC .
- Simultaneous voice and LTE (SVLTE) : In this approach, the handset works simultaneously in the LTE –Packet switching mode and circuit switched modes, with the LTE mode providing data services and the circuit switched mode providing the voice service. This is a solution solely based on the handset, which does not have special requirements on the network and does not require the deployment of IMS either. The disadvantage of this solution is that the phone can become expensive with high power consumption.
Read more at https://jhilmilbhansali.wordpress.com/2016/09/13/established-biggies-vs-jio/ for Indian Biggies vs Jio ,Plan & Pricing comparison
Enthralling Ventures!!! 