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In India, smartphones and cheap data are giving women a voice
- sharadov 6y agoSpeech detection is just amazing when you think about illiterate folk, it's a game changer for them. Jio's genius was offering free data plans for a year, getting folks hooked. But the fact that it only costs 9 cents a GB is amazing.
- shripadk 6y ago> But the fact that it only costs 9 cents a GB is amazing. It has now reduced to 4 cents per GB for Jio Fiber. I'm sure local ISPs have reduced prices even more just to compete with Jio (in some places you can get 3.3TB for 10$)
- op03 6y agoAt that rate I am guessing the network doesn't have to deal with rain or snow or customer issues cause obviously the budget for all that is not required because how can it even exist? It's following the now classic Facebook model of pointing at scale achieved and outsourcing all the issues that scale produces to someone else namely govts, parents, teachers, the healthcare system, the police etc etc and then blaming all of those idiots for not being hip enough to handle it. After all the networking are empowering women at 4c/GB. We are nearing 20 years of this false narrative of the magic of "free" scale/magic companies with 10k employees handling a billion customers. Given all the issues that have accumulated, keep track of how many more years its going to take for the chimp brain to figure out it was never possible.
- alkonaut 6y ago> At that rate I am guessing the network doesn't have to deal with rain or snow What’s the connection between weather and fiber?
- JadeNB 6y ago> What’s the connection between weather and fiber? Exposed cables (and there are some, at least in US—my installer had to run some last-mile cables from the nearest, uh, tower, I guess, to my house) suffer from poor weather.
- alkonaut 6y agoWow. That sounds sketchy to say the least.
- cosmie 6y agoThey didn't come back and bury those? I have AT&T Fiber – the installer ran a line from the nearest fiber hut to my home (across several neighbors' yards and a storm water runoff/drainage area), and left it exposed. But a separate truck rolled through about a week later and microtrenched it, so it's buried all the way up to my house.
- JadeNB 6y agoThey're running from a tower to my roof, so they can't be buried. (I just relay what the installer told me; I don't know anything about the details.)
- cosmie 6y agoOh interesting. I was curious and found [1], which mentions aerial deployment is actually preferred when poles are available. Around me, you might see aerial to neighborhood cabinets, but everything past that (cabinet -> pedestal, pedestal -> premise) is always buried. Considering how much of a pain buried lines are around here, I had presumed that there was some value to this. But looks like it might just be a constraint imposed by local regulations. [1] https://www.ofsoptics.com/fiber-optic-solutions-for-the-home/ https://www.ofsoptics.com/fiber-optic-solutions-for-the-home...
- rohan1024 6y agoThey maybe charging customers a penny but they offering services on top of there network and earning tons of money from it.
- 1f60c 6y agoI think GP means that data is so cheap that there won't be any money to fix the cables in case they break due to an extreme weather event.
- blueblisters 6y agoService issues do occur but ISPs are getting better at uptime because of the competition. A bigger issue is network saturation, especially for 4G networks. With fiber, on the other hand, some ISPs are offering upto 10-15% more than the quoted bandwidth just because there's plenty of spare capacity. Not sure if that will be the case in a few years.
- shripadk 6y ago> At that rate I am guessing the network doesn't have to deal with rain or snow or customer issues cause obviously the budget for all that is not required because how can it even exist? There is no such issue that ISPs are unable to solve with the infrastructure they have deployed at least for now. Keep in mind that what I am saying is anecdotal but I have a strong feeling it is the same for most Indians. In fact it was worse off earlier when they charged exorbitant rates but failed to deliver proper connectivity. Now things have improved multi-fold! Connectivity issues are now only evident when you travel to remote areas of the country. Earlier we had connectivity issues in the City/Town limits. You are forgetting that it is at a scale of multiple hundreds of millions and potentially billions of customers that these ISPs are charging cents from. Every single day. That with value added services, which they charge extra, would mean they make a fortune! Cost of labour is cheap in India. Land area being small is an added bonus as that would mean lesser cable laying work and lesser infrastructure. And since we skipped a generation of DSL/ADSL lines and jumped straight into 4G and Fiber we won't be facing much of the same issues that first World countries are facing today. Fixing network issues would be easier than say USA (you can fit 3 Indias (3.287 million square kms) in one USA (9.834 million square kms)).
- tchalla 6y ago> But the fact that it only costs 9 cents a GB is amazing. 9cents in India would be equivalent to 1.91 USD after taking into account Purchasing Power Parity (OECD 2019). Therefore, you are in effect saying 1.91 USD per GB is amazing. You can not compare values without including purchasing power disparities.
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- shripadk 6y agoPPP makes no sense when it comes to comparing data usage between countries. Data is not based on same supply/demand characteristics as physical goods. It is quite literally arbitrary. Much like most software you buy/subscribe to. Ever bought a digital product at 90% discount during Black Friday or Cyber Monday? Why don't you find physical products with 90% discounts (unless it is a clearance sale)? Because you can't discount cost involved in acquiring raw materials and labour cost. Digital products on the other hand can be duplicated infinite times with zero additional cost. So is anything connected to it (which includes data, storage and processing). Sure there is some cost involved. But at scale that cost becomes negligible. You can't produce physical products at scale without the cost also scaling proportionally. Even in India, before Jio made its entry, data was extremely expensive. Horrible speeds, very low data limits and no competitive pricing (you can say that it was a data cartel of sorts). Jio disrupted the entire sector. All ISPs reduced prices overnight. How could they do it? Wouldn't it hit their bottom line? Nope! They never went into loss in the first place. They charged exorbitant rates because they could. Not because there was some basis for it. That monopoly was disrupted. That is all there is to it. And with a billion+ people in the country, ISPs will never go under loss for selling data for few cents - a dollar. Rather, they are probably making more than they ever did. Jio showed them the way to price correctly.
- tchalla 6y ago> PPP makes no sense when it comes to comparing data usage between countries. We are not comparing data usage, we are comparing the value of two different currencies. The value of 100 US$ in India is different from that in the US or the EU. In order to normalise the value between two currencies, PPP is used. It doesn't matter what the 100US$ is spent on, data or food.
- finphil 6y agoGreat read ^.^
- tmikaeld 6y agoThat's an exciting read and it's hard to grasp the sheer numbers involved here, no wonder bandwidth is troublesome at these scales. Feels like this could eventually start a liberating movement for women across the country.
- Guthur 6y agoDon't worry, no one is ever that interested in men being happy anyway.
- pascalmahe 6y agoThat's because men are not victims of a system tailored to others' needs. Women are: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_inequality_in_India https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_inequality_in_India
- Guthur 6y agoAnd so your point is their happiness doesn't matter? I can guarantee you there are many unhappy men that does see this so called advantage.
- llampx 6y agoSeems a bit of a leap to suggest that only men are interested in controlling women.
- pascalmahe 6y agoParent said nothing about only men being interested in controlling women. On the contrary, liberation of women can be liberation from mothers, mother in-laws, grandmothers...
- varvar 6y agoLiberating women from what exactly? It all seems ridiculous myth making, considering what indians have shared here on HN about how much asymmetrical power indian women have available through the court system in India, and the sort of abuses they inflict regularly, the misuse of the assymetry for material gain etc. But yeah I get it. It's the new Democracy + Capitalism freedom making program they NEED to go through for their own good.
- Proven 6y agoThe could have credited and celebrated free market capitalism (effected, among other things, by greed of the phone suppliers, telcos, and app makers), and that would have been illuminating. Instead it's about "cheap smartphones and data" - as if that happened by accident and could have been achieved by other means such as government planning and giveaways.
- kumarvvr 6y agoYeah, Data is cheap and smartphones are plenty. Indians are voracious consumers of content and healthy competition has reduced prices to absurdly low levels. I'm in an urban area, with connection from one of the biggest providers. It costs me about 9 USD a month for unlimited data (I mean, about 2 GB a day, BUT, with carry forward, so I have about 250 GB of data to use in my account), unlimited calls and sms. I stopped worrying about data a long time ago. And I don't even use JIO, the provider that brought in massive reductions in data prices. Edit : I stopped using WiFi even at home, consume about 40 GB a month.
- cageface 6y agoSounds like it's time to revise some of the advice web developers get about optimizating page sizes for developing markets.
- markdown 6y agoNO! Letting yourself go just because you have access to bigger clothes isn't healthy.
- cageface 6y agoRevise, not throw out entirely. Optimization always adds complexity. Don't do it more than necessary.
- ryukafalz 6y agoEh, not necessarily. Both the simplest and most optimized pages I can think of are straight HTML with no Javascript. It takes work to add complexity starting from there!
- C19is20 6y agoYES! In that, I fully agree.
- kumarvvr 6y ago
- x3c 6y agoMore than the statistics, it's the stories that open your imagination to the unlock connectivity is bringing. Using WhatsApp to report timber theft is something I would never have guessed.
- RIMR 6y agoPersonally, using a communications network like WhatsApp to communicate things to each other is maybe the first use case I would have guessed.
- x3c 6y agoMore than the abstract notion of it being a communication platform, it's the specific usecases that open your imagination to the unlocks connectivity is bringing. Using WhatsApp to report timber theft is something I would never have guessed. I thought you'd have guessed the spirit of the comment since you're so adept at guessing.
- nexuist 6y agoThis is something I found amazing about WeChat as well. You can schedule appointments with barbers, doctors, physicians, etc all through custom interfaces implemented by 3rd party vendors within the app. It's kind of like its own operating system. And for all of the needs that aren't already covered, you can always resort to basic text messaging (again through WeChat). This probably covers 100% of business communications: customers talking to vendors, vendors talking to customers, and vendors talking to other vendors. The only thing missing as far as I know is a way to communicate with government entities to e.g. file paperwork and such. But I'm sure that will come in time.
- soupson 6y agoAs of 2017, you can file court documents using WeChat. https://www.scmp.com/tech/china-tech/article/2125804/tencents-wechat-messaging-platform-adopted-beijing-court-case-filing https://www.scmp.com/tech/china-tech/article/2125804/tencent...
- 6y ago
- blueblisters 6y agoIndia's female labor participation rate is 20%. In China, it's 60%. Smartphones can help bridge that gap a bit but real progress will probably come from creating safe, well-paying jobs.
- trianglem 6y agoThat’s because you are not counting housekeeping and child rearing as essential labor which is inaccurate.
- qsort 6y agoIs there any particular reason why you are assuming that housekeeping and child rearing should be the exclusive responsibility of women? I'm struggling to see any honest point in this comment.
- trianglem 6y agoI said saying only 20% of women are involved in labor in India is incorrect. That number is much much higher if you take those into account.
- managerclass 6y agoThe statistic is saying that 20% of women in India participate in the workforce as it is defined. Are you trying to say that the 60% of Chinese women includes women who are homemakers and aren't in the workforce as it is defined?
- volgo 6y agoYou’re wrong. Every country would have 99% labor participation rate if you count those. It’s not meaningful The fact is only 20% of women are not getting paid for their labor. It’s a sign of huge lack of development progress
- foggyeyes69 6y agoI think OP was making a statement about how things are rather than how they should be. I agree with you that this shouldn’t be the case, but right now it absolutely is the case in India.
- RIMR 6y agoIf data can be $0.09/GB in India, why does it cost so much more here in the USA?
- missedthecue 6y agomore expensive inputs to construct and maintain cell networks in the USA. If you look at Indian telcos and US telcos, they have similar profit margins.
- jimmaswell 6y agoI think it's moreso that you can't get blood out of a stone (people wouldn't buy it over there if it cost more) and the true cost of mobile data distributed over all customers is close to $0.
- missedthecue 6y agoWhy doesn't verizon have 600% net margins then?
- imtringued 6y agomore land and less people
- jimmaswell 6y agoPeople like to make a contrarian point on here that technology doesn't solve cultural or political problems but as you can see, it often does.
- rramadass 6y agoFrom the article; > Ravi Agarwal, author of the 2018 book India Connected: How the Smartphone Is Transforming the World's Largest Democracy says that for many Indians, the smartphone is their first private TV screen, personal music player, computer, and camera. Agarwal compares it to the experience of owning a car for the first time—autonomy, privacy, and mobility. Exactly right! This is what is truly liberating to the underprivileged.
- 2Gkashmiri 6y agoAh. I just crossed 500 days of ban on high speed mobile internet. So much for cheap data and fundamental right. I think indian supreme court even decided against declaring intenet as a fundamental right because the same wasnt in the constitution. Smh.
- wolfretcrap 6y agoWomen in India need liberation. I talked with many married women who feel trapped in marriage but have no way out because they won't find a good enough job for them. They need to be shown power of feminism.