6 ms·

Speech 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, getti

Speech 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 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? 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 ago
        Wow. That sounds sketchy to say the least.
      - cosmie 6y ago
        They 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 ago
        They'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 ago
        Oh 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 ago
    They maybe charging customers a penny but they offering services on top of there network and earning tons of money from it.
    - 1f60c 6y ago
      I 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 ago
    Service 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.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- shripadk 6y ago
  PPP 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.

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 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? 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 ago
      Wow. That sounds sketchy to say the least.
    - cosmie 6y ago
      They 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 ago
        They'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 ago
        Oh 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 ago
  They maybe charging customers a penny but they offering services on top of there network and earning tons of money from it.
  - 1f60c 6y ago
    I 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 ago
  Service 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.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
shripadk 6y ago
PPP 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.