Wednesday, June 04, 2008

Forward ya Backward?

Remember the 1990s in India's telecom sector? If I were to describe it in two sentences, they will be the salient features of the landline phones and cell phone in that period.
  1. People used to wait for the night (9:30 pm) before placing long-distance calls (STD).
  2. People had to pay Rs. 16 a minute for incoming calls when the cell phones were just introduced.
It is all part of history now, thanks to the telecom revolution. But this revolution seems to have missed one important country, the USA. If someone would have told this to me a couple of months back, I wouldn't have believed him. But now I have a first-hand experience.

When I wanted to break the good news to my friend Anurag a few days back, I found myself waiting for the clock to tick past 9 pm.

Why? Because I had exhausted my cell phone call minutes for the month.

Why? Because I didn't realize that they would be charging minutes even for incoming calls (@ Rs. 4/minute approx.) until it was too late to avoid the inevitable.

Guess what? India is two steps ahead of USA in this regard. Not only were all incoming calls made free years ago, we now have operators who pay you to receive incoming calls. I haven't opted for SMS services in my plan, but my friends tell me that they have to pay to receive SMSes. Isn't that ingenious?

I never thought I would be using Skype for making domestic calls, but that's what I eventually did. It is much cheaper than my cell phone plan.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Hi ,

I was reading ur blog posts and found some of them to be wow.. u write well.. Why don't you popularize it more.. ur posts on ur blogs took my particular attention as some of them are interesting topics of mine too;

BTW I help out some ex-IIMA guys who with another batch mate run www.rambhai.com where you can post links to your most loved blog-posts. Rambhai was the chaiwala at IIMA and it is a site where users can themselves share links to blog posts etc and other can find and vote on them. The best make it to the homepage!

This way you can reach out to rambhai readers some of whom could become your ardent fans.. who knows.. :)

Cheers,

Ambuj Saxena said...

Dharam,

I could not find an e-mail address to contact you, so writing here hoping you have subscribed for follow-up comments.

Pardon me if I am wrong, but your comment reads like a spam to me. It says nothing about any particular post of mine, and is most likely a common template you posted around on all the blogs. Furthermore, you posted it in wrong blog. My blog on socio-political issues is http://ambujsaxena.blogspot.com. This one is about my personal life.

In any case, I have stopped going about publicizing my blogs. If you liked a post, feel free to post it on your community. My blogs are licensed under CC-BY-SA license, so you don't even need my permission as long as you attribute them to me and let the same previliges hold for the its derivative works.