The website of telecom regulator Trai remained inaccessible for a few hours for the second consecutive day due to a technical snag in its system provided by the National Informatics Centre. The site has been facing frequent outage since Monday when it made comments public that it received in response to consultation paper floated for regulation of over-the-top players and net neutrality. “A router was down due to which the website was inaccessible. NIC is fixing it,” Trai Secretary Sudhir Gupta told. The website of Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) saw huge traffic on its website on Monday after…
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Telecom Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad has asked state-run operator BSNL to improve quality of services, especially in border and extremist-affected areas, in a bid to become market leader and win back people’s confidence. The minister also said that the government is committed to revive BSNL and numbers of initiatives are in the pipeline to bring the PSU back to the position of market leader. Prasad, who met MPs from Bihar, Meghalaya, Manipur and Nagaland on Monday, also said that a major initiative has been launched by BSNL to improve quality of signal and it plans to add another 1,150 towers…
To check the call drop menace, Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) will soon put in place a new set of ‘service quality benchmarks’, non-adherence to which may lead to stricter penal action against the mobile operators. The new parameters should be announced within a month, Trai Chairman Rahul Khullar said on Wednesday. “It is a work in progress,” Khullar said on the sidelines of an Assocham event in New Delhi, but declined to divulge details of the new parameters. He was replying to queries on whether the regulator was planning to change the parameters for quality of service norms…
Our government is going increasingly digital and with mobile penetration and number of smartphone users in India skyrocketing, it’s getting easier than ever to do things online or via our phones. The catch is that most people don’t actually know you can do all this so easily – and that’s why we are trying to help our readers find out about different government services that are now online, and showing you how to use them. This week, we look at how to book a train ticket from IRCTC via SMS. The Indian Railways’ IRCTC website is the source of frustration…
If you thought you were the only one who finds the 3G services offered by Airtel/ Vodafone/ *Insert name of your operator here* useless, think again. According to an Ericsson consumer insight report released in New Delhi on Tuesday, 48 percent of mobile Internet users in India are unable to perceive any difference between 2G and 3G Internet services. You can call them silly or foolish, given the huge difference between 2G and 3G Internet on paper, but the ground reality in India – especially if you live in major cities like Delhi and Mumbai – is completely different. 3G…
Sweden’s Ericsson, the world’s biggest maker of mobile telecoms equipment, will probably have to expand its range of fixed line products to defend its turf following Nokia’s purchase of Alcatel-Lucent. As the Finnish and French firms combine, Ericsson will face a much stronger competitor with a broader product offering, bigger sales and R&D clout than itself. It may therefore respond by buying companies to bring in fixed line technologies. “Global operators have all made the shift to converge fixed and mobile, and now equipment makers will have to follow suit,” Alcatel-Lucent Chief Executive Michael Combes said on Wednesday, adding that…
Way back in 1989, Asus started out as a consultancy service for motherboard manufacturers. According to industry legend, Asus got a leg up in the industry after designing a motherboard for Intel’s 486 CPU without access to a processor, even fixing problems that Intel’s own engineers had had. Today, the two are still close partners, and Asus uses Intel’s mobile processors in its smartphones and tablets. Last year’s ZenFone 4 , ZenFone 5, and ZenFone 6 were runaway successes for Asus in India thanks primary to cutthroat pricing and dependable performance. Now, Asus has just launched a new series called…
We’ve come to expect China-based Gionee to push the boundaries of smartphone slimness. The Elife S5.5 and its successor, the Elife S5.1 – the model numbers indicate their slimness in mm – are examples from the recent past. However, other Chinese brands such as Oppo and Vivo have launched even thinner models and the title of the slimmest smartphone now lies with the Vivo X5Max . This year, Gionee seems to have slightly different plans and it isn’t going for bragging rights. To our surprise, the company took the wraps off its latest smartphone, the Elife S7, at MWC in…
USB Type-C, the supposedly magical new standard that promises to solve all our connectivity problems, is finally real and ready for mainstream use. Type-C has been in development for a while – we first heard about it over a year ago and first saw it in action at CES in January. Now, with the high-profile launch of Apple’s new ultra-minimalist MacBook, Type-C has gone public in a big way. Type-C is meant to be able to work with all kinds of devices. More importantly, the same plug will be used on both sides of the cable and it is symmetrical…
Micromax has launched two budget 3G-enabled smartphones, the Bolt S300 and Bolt D320. Both phones are available in Black colour, and come bundled with two month free data plans for Vodafone users. The Micromax Bolt S300 will be available in the market from Tuesday at Rs. 3,300, while the Micromax Bolt D320 will be available from mid-April onwards – no price has been revaled for the latter yet. The dual-SIM Micromax Bolt S300 runs Android 4.4.3 KitKat out-of-the-box and features a 4-inch WVGA (480×800 pixels) display. The smartphone is powered by a 1GHz single-core Spreadtrum SC7715 processor coupled with 512MB…
Xiaomi at its Tuesday event in China revealed new devices on the occasion of its fifth anniversary, alongside announcing a price cut for the Mi 4. The firm’s 2014 flagship smartphone, the Xiaomi Mi 4 will now retail at CNY 1,799 (approximately Rs. 18,000) for the 16GB variant down from the previous price tag of CNY 1,999 (approximately Rs. 20,000). According to GizmoChina, a ‘lite’ variant of the Xiaomi Mi 4 with 2GB of RAM instead of 3GB, will now retail at CNY 1,699 (approximately Rs. 17,000) – a CNY 100 price cut from the earlier price of CNY 1,799.…
Nearly a year ago, HTC launched the Desire 816. This phone had a serious impact on the market, because it offered solid specifications and quality at a mid-range price. This was followed by the HTC Desire 820, another successful device with an impressive feature list. The Desire 820 was also one of the first smartphones to feature Qualcomm’s 64-bit octa-core Snapdragon 615 SoC, and showed HTC’s intent to win over the mid-range market. Just a few short months after the HTC Desire 820 , we have the HTC Desire 820s. Not a lot has changed between then and now; the…