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Comment by enitihas | Hacker News Reader

Ironically, the prices are far lower than they were in those insanely competitive days.

True, yet recently I recall prices being raised and all firms moving in lock step. A classic signs of oligopolistic behavior.

Further all 3 major firms are in massive debt, and after the SC interpretation of how they have to pay their dues, they are pretty much dead firms unless they get money.

You can already see them creating new packages to target users who have more disposable income.

I'd say make hay while the sun shines. The structure of a market dictates the strategies and tactics which work. With 3 players collusion is the norm, not competition.

I don't think Jio's game is to squeeze out revenue from the cheap data users. They've openly admitted to using Deep-packet Inspection techniques and I believe data harvesting is where the main long-term game looks to be for them.

If you're concerned about your privacy, it's usually known in India in the tech circles to stay away from Jio related products.

https://in.reuters.com/article/reliance-telecoms-jio/from-bi...

https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/reliance-jio-...

What can any packet inspection do over https, since that's where the majority of the important traffic is,not to mention that a lot of apps use certificate pinning, so even MITM can't help analyse the packets. And all this is before eSNI becomes mainstream.

For now

It has been about 3 years atleast since Jio has paid plans, and things are still way way cheaper. Even if the prices double, they will be way cheaper than what they were.

Firms will just keep removing plans that help the poorest users as they work to get ARPU higher. This has to happen anyway because the major firms are under huge mountains of debt.

They cant be allowed to fall, because then the only name in town is reliance, which would be even worse.

What people are forgetting is that 1) Firms already raised prices and 2) that its not about data.

Its about a competitive market. We used to have this, and it even created the thriving VAS industry for a while. That died because of classic rent seeking behavior by telecoms over the VAS firms, killing that entire engine of ingenuity.

Telecom industries are know for bad results (see America, or Australia) when its not structured correctly.

Everyone who is focusing just on prices is unaware of the number of failures and missed opportunities resulting from bad telecom market structures.

Take Net neutrality, given the telcos way, it would have long been lost and rent seeking structures would have grown on top of it - it would recreate the bundled world of cable television over the net.

This means that poor users would never get a chance to look at products which compete purely on features and value - they would look at products that are "Jio Free" or "Vodafone plus", where having a hook up with the ISP is more important than features.

Looking at it in terms of "hey prices are low" is missing the great risk this industry is in.

My personal take is that for Jio the cellphone network is an opening to providing services that can be monetised in long run. Same strategy thats being followed by biggest tech companies across the world.

That will not work that well. Average Indian right now doesn't really have that much disposable income for such services to be very profitable. It will have to be the very long run. I doubt either google or Facebook earn a lot from India right now, and they are very well established, and their compute costs are as low as they can get. I don't see how Jio is going to be able to follow the strategy of the biggest tech companies.

I hope India does grow at a large enough rate for such services to be profitable.

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