India's richest man offers free 4G to one billion people | Hacker News Reader

India's richest man offers free 4G to one billion people

money.cnn.com

148 pointsZeljkoS74 comments

The big thing that techies on hacker news need to realize here is what this company is trying to do by collecting all the data with so called "deep packet inspection". they provide data at the cost of stealing all your activities on phone irrespective of app to do big data analytics. same thing that Facebook wanted to do via internet.org. It becomes easy this way. for them data is the new oil[1]!

[1] http://in.reuters.com/article/reliance-telecoms-jio-idINKCN1...

Do you have a source that says Facebook was planning on doing deep packet inspection?

I think what the comment meant was Facebook was trying to "steal all your (online) activities on phone irrespective of app to do big data analytics. "

This would have been trivial via the Free Basics program because Facebook would have been the gatekeeper for all the online activities. No deep packet inspection necessary. Just have the users agree to having all their interactions with those carefully selected 'partners' allowed to be used by FB ...for you know, providing better service and improving content.

At one point at least, internet.org wasn't supporting HTTPS (see https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2015/05/05/facebook-opens-u...).

Doesn't prove anything, but not supporting tls makes me think they want to inspect the traffic.

Isn't this something that every ISP would be able to do? Or are you saying they have something special? If so, how?

Sure, except the problem is "the last mile". 4g solves this by virtue, and they're offering it for free for this advantage.

No not free, free for first 3-4 months.

I'm not clear as to what insights will DPI provide once data is encrypted. What am I missing ?

You are missing that also meta data such as the connected host, the time spent on a connected host, time of access, data volume transferred etc is also valuable. Also, they know the subscriber pretty well to begin with. Also their location.

Also, lots of sites are not encrypted, still.

Not much for encrypted data, but they can still get metadata out of it (which site you visited, how much traffic was exchanged relative to other sites you visited, what times of the day you visited, which days of the week you visited, usage patterns, etc.). For example, if you have a pattern of visiting say, an Amazon store, that information could be useful to have rivals of Amazon to target you with ads or special offers, even if they cannot find what exactly you did on Amazon.

The voice calls are also on LTE (VoLTE), and a similar DPI scheme could be used to get a lot out of that by recording and inspecting content and metadata. Legality aside, if they're intent on mining data, there are millions of people who wouldn't even know what http vs. https means or to use end-to-end encrypted apps for calls, etc. (or probably not care as much). I'm not implying that nobody will care, because there may be another prominent movement (savetheinternet) like the one that helped block Facebook's Free Basics initiative through campaigns and well crafted letters to the authorities.

> Not much for encrypted data, but they can still get metadata out of it (which site you visited, how much traffic was exchanged relative to other sites you visited, what times of the day you visited, which days of the week you visited, usage patterns, etc.). For

Just use a VPN?

Well, yes, but unfortunately, of the billion+ people here in India, I doubt if a significant percentage has even heard of a VPN, leave alone the matter of knowing what it does or knowing how to go about getting and setting one up.

Or about paying for one

No, Facebook wanted you to just access Facebook and a few other Facebook Approved services.

https://info.internet.org/en/story/free-basics-from-internet...

Every website is routed through Facebook servers. They created a pseudo-standard as opposed to standard HTML and only the websites with that would be allowed onto the program. Imagine if Google comes over and says "AMP" loads faster, takes less data is better but, is a subset of HTML spec & "Google"-sponsored format; So, we will give free internet access but, only websites which adapt to our specifications would be allowed and not everyone. You either provide internet access or no. Facebook could have gone with tiered system in regard to Free basics as in provide free data only for about "X" GB. Most of India consumes internet in terms of amount of data. They didn't go about this approach but, rather wanted to get on with providing free internet but, collect data of the website visit information, hava user analytics.

Another important consideration is that Facebook only allowed any website to be in it after initial backlash. Initially, it only allowed websites deemed necessary by Facebook like "facebook", "messenger", "groups" and "Google. No way for users or website owners to say they'd like a wesbite "xyz" as part of program. This was and is an attempt by Facebook to create a walled gatway to internet by Facebook masked by their philanthrophic arm.

For a moment, I thought VPN's were the answer to this, for privacy-conscious people in India, but do such VPN's exist that are financially accessible to people from India that don't go through ISP's that do the same thing?

> for privacy-conscious people in India

Privacy conscious in India? It wouldn't even go up to as high as 0.000001%

OperaVPN is free on iPhone - I started using it recently and it's pretty great.

They're surely mining your data. Why else would they do this ?

I have no love lost for this guy - or his company - but to be fair, why can this not be thought of as a strategy to acquire (a mother lode of) future (paying) users? Kind of bait and switch? I would say the investment of 3 or 4 months of free service is negligible as compared to the long-term revenues that this strategy would bring in.

Any benefit/s derived via possible deep data mining would only be the icing on the cake.

It was also reported earlier [0]:

  Privacy: An unnamed Jio executive mentioned “deep packet
  inspection” to Reuters, saying: “It’s called deep packet
  inspection, and what you can do with the analytics of that is
  mind-boggling,” he said, referring to a practice that digs into
  “packets” of data created by computers for efficiency, mining
  them for information. If this is happening and Jio is accessing
  data packets to develop patterns of user data consumption, this
  is a major privacy violation. The company deserves to be taken
  to court for this, as much as the India needs a privacy law.

[0] http://www.wsj.com/articles/reliances-ambani-lays-out-plan-f...

And given that he and the PM are buddies, one has to wonder if this is India's own NSA masquerading as something empowering and progressive.

Doesn't Comcast do deep packet inspection? it throttles certain protocols/services (torrents is one example)

If this is true, it must be region specific. My Comcast connection doesn't throttle anything, torrents included, and has never failed to get approximately 110% of the speed I pay for.

Wow, blatant PR!

India's billions have had access to Internet for several years now. While traveling last year in rural areas, I was able to get voice and Internet (3G), with data plans costing $4 per Gb. And I had the option to choose from 4 different providers.

Jio has definitely taken the lead in country-wide LTE, compared to HSPA+ from other providers.

This is more like evolution than revolution. Yet Fareed Zakaria goes on and on about richest man, most expensive home, cash generating business, etc.

India only has 1.2 billions

Seems to be the equivalent of any "free - for a limited time" type offer that most subscription-based services use as bait.

Except the price after the free period is still 0.2x current rates from competitors.

True, but for how long?

Many commercially-smart people here colloquially describe this company as following (loose translation):

You can get some/any ultimate benefit out of them only if you're capable of extracting holy water out of a crow's back side!! :-)

You realize that $4 per Gb is quite high for India?

It isn't. As an Indian, this is very nearly the price that we are used to paying for cable television (monthly). (DTH providers like TataSky might actually be costlier). And internet has now become almost as important as cable TV for a huge population.

There is also the dependency with the "smart-phone". A decent smartphone with 3G would cost ~120 USD (8k INR). If you can pay for that, you can usually afford 2$/month or so for half a gig of data to spend on WhatsApp.

This works if half a gig is all you use in a month. Just using Google maps makes that impossible.

>>"[...] Indians will be able to use Jio for free until the end of 2016, and pay as little as 149 rupees ($2.25) a month for data after that."

For additional context, Jio data rates on a $/GB basis are around one-fifth the price of competing data rates in India, and voice will evidently remain free nationwide, without roaming charges, even after the promotion period ends.[1]

This seems like a game changer, provided Jio can take enough market share and start to turn a profit on their 4G network with the subsidized smartphones and free voice calling.

Free voice calling scares Reliance's competitors because voice still constitutes over 60% of average revenue per user (example: in early 2016 voice was over 70%+ of Bharti Airtel's ARPU[2]). If Jio is successful, voice ARPU should drop like a rock for everybody else. The same will happen with Reliance too, but at least they're dictating the pace and degree of change on their own terms.

[1] http://indianexpress.com/article/technology/tech-news-techno...

[2] http://www.business-standard.com/article/companies/bharti-ai...

If you look at their "packs" 199Rs: 0.5 something data 599: 20+ GB data

the minimum pack is of 599 if you need data, the fact that the $/GB cost is low is a marketing gimmick.

Also, yes, voice calling is a revenue generator for every other network, it'd be interesting to see how they take this challenge, considering Jio has a fiber optic cable network throughout India!

er... isn't 599r somewhere on the order of $9 USD? I'd kill to get 20+ GB a month for 9 dollars.

Would you if you made 2 dollars a day, as the average Indian citizen does?

It's 4gb for 599/- But night data is free. Night is probably from 2-5 am

So this seems like it entirely defeats Facebook's efforts in India with Internet.org... which brings up the question of why Facebook didn't just do this?

This is the same company that Facebook was going to use with Internet.org. It looks like after Facebook's attempt was blocked, he realized he didn't have to be a middleman, and could just offer cheap service on his infrastructure anyway. Still, this comes across as even more damage to Facebook's attempt to be seen as altruistic, even if I expect the profit-seeking is just slightly less obvious in this case.

EDIT: Oh no, the plot thickens! Facebook was working through Reliance Communications, a subsidiary of Reliance Anil Dhirubhai Ambani Group. Reliance Jio is a subsidiary of Reliance Industries Limited. These are two halves of a split business empire; Mukesh Ambani didn't take Facebook's idea, he took the idea Facebook had for his brother!

Mukesh Ambani had been planning this for a long time now. They got the license couple of years back and then started building out the infrastructure. However Facebook's freebasics and the failed venture with his brother's company might have had some effect on the pricing that Jio is offering now.

I was writing up my comment when you asked this, check it -- tl;dr : This is the same telco which was partnering with Facebook before the regulatory authority shot Free Basics down.

No, this is not the same telco.

Because Facebook doesn't want India to use Internet. Facebook wants India to use Facebook.

Straight up right out of The Kingsmen

Ha ha, my thought exactly! Looking forward to the fireworks.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2802144/

Ditto

Don't forget to silence your phone in church :-)

Ditto

Unfortunate journalism.

Suddenly makes everything appear like an act of philanthropy.

Something that an old person once told me was that everything is being sold and sometimes you're the product. This is the case of "free" in this usage.

This would be "free" in the same exact way that Microsoft's "free" windows 10 upgrade was "free."

With the title structured like that (it's the company, albeit owned by India's richest man -- is it public?), this news-piece already screams "PR". But it seems like a good thing at least in the short-term -- it will start a price-war which can only hopefully benefit the customer (again in the short-term -- long-term it might kill other players in the market).

I was recently reading an article about James Watt, and his steam engine. It's a remarkable story.

I'm reasonably intelligent, but I'm pretty sure that even if I was given his tools and his blueprints, I would never be able to construct an actual working steam engine (input burning coal, output rotating shaft).

This got me thinking about how in India (I'm Indian), we don't have any of the older technology. We don't actually know how to construct a steam engine, or an internal combustion engine, or an electrical engine from scratch. All the key components are imported from Japan, or Germany or the U.S. As a child, my little toys with electrical or gas motors (RC airplanes) in them were all imported.

I think there's a lot of focus on software because it's actually easier to tinker with. All one needs is a PC and internet. I suspect there are lots of mechanically inclined Indians who would love to work on motors, engines, stuff that makes shafts rotate. But we simply don't have the basic tools and infrastructure to tinker with those.

I guess what I'm saying here is that while it's very good that there's more internet infrastructure being laid out in India. I wish someone like the Ambanis would lay out infrastructure that could allow for tinkering with older technology as well.

erm, just because you didn't bother looking doesn't mean the 'tools and infrastructure' don't exist in India. There are a shitton of Makers in India. Yes, Indians prefer the more thinking sciences like math and computer science but saying that's because we 'simply don't have the basic tools and infrastructure to tinker' is ridiculous.

All that said, I am assuming the only thread to connect this conversation with the article was that of net connectivity ?

You're probably one of those who also insists that India has the best teachers. Why I can't find any of their lectures on YouTube (but find a "shitton" of lectures from non-Indians) is interesting.

You also probably believe India has the most powerful supercomputer and the best space program (for its budget).

I'm more interested in the masses of Indians not having to shit on the street outside where they live, and having access to clean drinking water and refrigerators.

Also, could you name some Indian makers who can create a steam engine, or internal combustion engine, or electrical engine from scratch? Or any that have innovated in that sphere? OK, I'll make it easy for you. Can you name a single invention at any of the IITs in their entire history, an invention that is used by the rest of the world?

Also, you don't get to decide what I can post on here in which thread. HN has moderators for that purpose. And if they want, they can let me know.

> could you name some Indian makers who can create a steam engine, or internal combustion engine, or electrical engine from scratch? Or any that have innovated in that sphere?

You seem to be focusing too much on anger and condescension here. I'll stop with one answer for your question above. You can derive your own conclusions - G.D.Naidu. [1] I'm sure there are at least several more that can be found by searching online.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopalswamy_Doraiswamy_Naidu

His motor used parts that were pre-built abroad. He himself admitted that there was nothing original about his design, that he used existing blueprints to build it.

Now, you're not planning on designing your own chip, your ISA, your OS, your toolchain and your applications. are you?

  > You're probably one of those who also insists that India has the best teachers.

No, I'm not ^one of those^ (whatever that's supposed to imply). I think our education system is a mess and I also cannot claim to be 'well educated' in any kind of academic sense.

  > You also probably believe India has the most powerful supercomputer
  > and the best space program (for its budget).

Don't know about the supercomputer but as far as a space program is concerned, as a matter of fact, yes indeed I do -- for its budget, ISRO is has an amazing track record by any measure. So, it's not so much of a belief than a fact.

  > I'm more interested in the masses of Indians not having to shit on the street
  > outside where they live, and having access to clean drinking water and 
  > refrigerators.

wait, what, I, wait, ...what ? Seriously ? Yes, dear fellow Indian, the majority of us are also concerned about those matters as well, but what you declare so passionately is so completely orthogonal to the context ! Well, I shall yet attempt to bring the conversation back on track by saying that inventions tend to be created to solve local problems and that's why we possibly don't have a whole lot of innovation happening that is used by the rest of the world but we surely have guys like these:

http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-26260978

  > Also, could you name some Indian makers who can create a steam engine, or 
  > internal combustion engine, or electrical engine from scratch? Or any that 
  > have innovated in that sphere? OK, I'll make it easy for you. Can you name a 
  > single invention at any of the IITs in their entire history, an invention that 
  > is used by the rest of the world?

I'll do better than that. I'll teach you how to wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Indian_inventions_and_...

Of course, going by previous similar conversations with others who would look at ^India^ only from the limited perspective of their immediate and personal experiences, I assume that's not going to convince you. In anycase, I'll leave you with a few passing thoughts (and that's all I'll intend on engaging further):

a. The reasons for lack of 'world famous' innovation extends beyond lack of tools and infrastructure. The hierarchy of needs or social attitudes towards failure play important roles as well.

b. Despite that there is a community of people who do enjoy to tinker and build stuff. Just for the heck of it. Not with the intent of making something that would be 'used by the rest of the world' but to solve local problems. Most of these do not make it big. They are inventions nonetheless

c. Often times these people end up leaving India to go settle abroad. And finally yes, here is where the lack of resources and infrastructure tend to weigh in on the decision.

d. About this:

  > HN has moderators for that purpose

No it doesn't. At least not in the reddit sense. No, they don't 'let you know'. HN is largely community moderated.

Have a good time here, cheers !

Couldn't find anything to do with steam engines, internal combustion engines, or electric motors.

Couldn't find anything invented at IITs.

"Here, let me tell you about Indian inventions from 1000 B.C. !!!"

That's a thoughtful response.

> You're probably one of those who also insists that India has the best teachers.

While this is completely unrelated to the thread and extremely judgmental, I'd still like to know if you seriously think that somebody with the exposure to have an account on hackernews would also think that India has the best teachers?

Most western countries are the same. I live in Scotland, and quite near where James Watt was born. That doesn't mean that I grew up around steam engines, or that I have been exposed to steam engines through my life. Like most places, the interconnectedness of global trade, plus the sheer complexity of modern devices, means that most people have no exposure to manufacturing.

At one time, the town where I live was a full of Victorian manufacturing, with factories clogging up every street. Few of those factories survive today. Both my grandfathers worked in a local factory, which manufactured ball bearings and other machined items. In their time, it employed a couple thousand people on a huge site. Today, the company still exists, and still manufactures products, but with far far fewer people (well less than 100 I think).

So the general population's exposure to manufacturing is far lower, as even where factories still exist far far less labour is required so that general cultural exposure is low.

Thanks for your thoughtful comment. I really think we're losing something by not having this kind of knowledge more evenly spread out in the population. There was a time when my near-ancestors could all stitch up a wound or re-set a bone. Such first-aid was a necessary skill. That too is missing in the population today.

FWIW, this very same company that was planning to introduce Facebook's Free Basics as part of this very launch before the TRAI shot it down. The posted article links to the news report of that fiasco without making this fact clear.

So no, this isn't some sort of altruistic move by Reliance. They would've exploited the resulting situation if they had the freedom to do so with Free Basic (and if reports are correct -- they will be doing it anyways, by monitoring traffic on their Jio platform).

It is such an irony that Zuckerberg's ^mission^ of digitizing India by offering a trojan is being realized without Free Basics/internet.org by the very same company that they were planning to peddle it through.

EDIT: yes, I was mistaken, Free Basics was being peddled by Reliance Communications and this is Reliance Industries. Seems like the brothers either did bury the hatchet and decided on this as Plan B after free basics failed or Mukesh just disciplined Anil in the art of PR.

I think that it was Reliance Communications (Mukesh's brothers company) and not Reliance Jio that facebook hd tied up to deliver free basics. It is not the same company.

How full of shit is Zuckerberg do you think?

There is no hatchet burying relevant to this: Mukesh and Anil's Reliances are separate. Reliance Communications direct competes with Reliance Jio.

Uh huh? Tell me more please because what I read here :

http://telecom.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/reliance-ji...

Reliance Jio has already inked a pact with Anil Ambani-owned Reliance Communications for airwaves sharing while the latter has acquired the Russsian telco Sistema that offers services under the MTS brand.

The deal allowed Reliance Communications to get access to MTS spectrum in the 850 Mhz band that can be used to offer 4G services.

Is complete falsehood! Sheesh, journalists huh?

Here's another : http://telecomtalk.info/ril-infotel-and-rcom-to-tie-up-for-4...

And some other things, which of course are unrelated and completely coincidental:

http://telecom.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/infrastruct...

http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2012-04-23/news...

Competitors can still collaborate.

True. Although collaboration while holding on to hatchets is a bit inconvenient. That's all I meant to imply.

Your snark is unnecessary. Had you Googled a bit more, you would have seen that they also share towers with Airtel, among others. Airtel is also a retail telecom competitor.

Lol this reminds me of Samuel L. Jackson in Kingsman.

that was my first thought XD

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