~TECH-BYTES~

The Department of Telecom is planning to formulate a separate policy for third generation services by CDMA operators.

The move comes as a relief to CDMA players including Reliance Communication and Tata Teleservices which had expressed concern that the proposed 3G policy had no mention of spectrum allocation for CDMA operators. Until now DoT’s draft policy guidelines had specified plans to auction spectrum only for GSM-based cellular services providers.

However, DoT has put up a new note for approval by the Ministry of Communication which mentions auctioning spectrum for CDMA players in the 450 Mhz and 800 Mhz frequency band.

This means that seventy one million CDMA mobile subscribers can also look forward to availing third generation mobile services.

The 800 Mhz and 450 Mhz bands are frequencies used by CDMA operators globally for 3G services. Third generation mobile services promises to bring high speed data connectivity on handsets apart from improving the quality of voice calls.

Consumers will be able to get services like streaming video, mobile TV and community specific value added services.

While GSM based operators will evolve to using the WCDMA technology for offering this service, CDMA players will use the EVDO technology.

Each of these technologies operates best in a specific frequency band.

“Spectrum shall be auctioned in the 450 Mhz band and in 800 Mhz band for EVDO services when it becomes available, for which guidelines shall be issued separately,” said the DoT note.

Reliance Communications, Tata Teleservices, Sistema backed Shyam Telelink and State owned Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd are the major CDMA operators in the country.

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DoT identifies more spectrum, to expand auctions from earlier estimate of five in each service area.

The Department of Telecommunications (DoT) has identified between 51 and 60 MHz of spectrum, the radio frequencies that enable wireless communications, in several service areas that will allow it to offer between 10 and 12 licences to operators to introduce third-generation (3G) services.

This marks a significant increase from the 3G policy that DoT had finalised — and is awaiting government clearance — of auctioning only five licences per circle on the basis of an availability of 25MHz of spectrum. 3G services enable high-speed download of data like movies and music on the mobile.

The 3G auction will now be undertaken based on the fresh availability of spectrum in various circles.

Based on the higher spectrum availability, DoT will now be able to offer licences to 12 operators each in Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu (including Chennai), Haryana, Karnataka, Orissa and Kerala; and 10 licences each in Kolkata and Madhya Pradesh.

DoT, however, has limited spectrum in Delhi (21 MHz), Gujarat (23 MHz) and Himachal Pradesh (21 MHz), which is enough to permit only four operators.

The identification of so much extra spectrum is significant as there are few other countries that offer consumers so many 3G service providers to choose from.

Globally, the number of operators per country ranges from two to a maximum of five. The UK has five 3G players, Australia and Brazil four each and most European states have between two and three. Singapore has only two players and the Philippines three.

Overall, there are 228 operators in 94 countries that offer 3G services.

With the government already issuing 11 to 13 licences for 2G services (second generation, or the current level of services) in every circle Indian consumers might get to choose from 15 to 16 operators in each circle for their mobile services (2G and 3G), which is unparalleled anywhere in the world.

But many experts said this might put pressure on the viability of the business for new players.

“The valuation of our licence has virtually halved or become a third of what we had estimated in January. We were looking at $4 billion; currently investors are chary about paying even $1-2 billion. That is because the market, despite the growth, cannot accommodate so many players,” said the chairman of a company that recently received an all-India licence.

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Knol is a new Google service created for sharing knowledge. The service has been announced in December 2007 and it’s now publicly available.

Knol has much more in common with Squidoo and HubPages than with Wikipedia. The service is centered around authors: each Knol article displays the name of its author and links to a small biography. Google even lets you verify your identity, but this only works if you live on the US.

Knol doesn’t intend to become an encyclopedia, so there’s no single article about a topic. An author can write about almost any topic, but it’s recommended to write authoritative content.

There are three levels of collaboration in Knol:

* open collaboration (any Knol user can edit the article)
* moderate collaboration (any Knol user can suggest changes to the article - enabled by default)
* closed collaboration (only the co-authors can edit the article)

Google uses a rich-text editor borrowed from Page Creator, so it’s much easier to edit knols than Wikipedia articles. Users can rate the articles, add comments and write reviews, much like for scholarly works.

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Some anonymous source for TechTree have spilled the beans regarding the launch date and pricing for iPhone 3G in India. It may come as a shock for many people but the source reckons the phone to be priced around Rs. 12,000 range but only 8GB variant will be available. Vodafone will be the first player to get the phone here because of its global presence and has a 15 days advantage than Airtel.

> Model: Initially, the 8GB version only
> Price: Rs. 11,500 to Rs. 12,000 (note: U.S. price of the 8GB iPhone 3G is $199)
> Applications: App Store will be available
> App prices: Application prices may see a revision to suit Indian market
> 3G: No fixed date for 3G availability; expected sometime later this year
> GPS: Present on the Indian version as well

The news has definitely opened up a new discussion for everyone waiting for the mighty iPhone to come over here but we cannot trust it until we hear it from the horse’s mouth.

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Finally i managed to transfer one of my blog from Y360 to wordpress… As you all know i transferred all my blogger blogs to my self-hosted word press blog and this was the last blog left but unfortunately it was on yahoo 360 and since their’s no export-import mechanism in y360 i couldn’t do so but because y360 is taking its last breath it was very important for me to transfer this blog and after a lot of hard work i found this great tool called “Y360 to word press” but after using it i realized i was expecting too much,it was not an easy task as it didn’t worked the way it promised firstly i had to remove all videos and polls even after that it was giving error while converting so i had to start from the last entry and by taking 5 or 10 entries at a time i had to convert them in xml format and then upload it to wordpress then the most difficult task delete the entries thaat have been successfully transfered you might be thinking what’s the difficulty in that well friends its y360 and not wordpress– 1 you can not select multiple entries and delete them you have to delete 1 at a time, 2 big time cache problem so when you delete entries and return to last page you might actually end up at an enty that you have allready deleted just refresh the page 2-3 times…

And after 2-3 days of hardwork i finally managed to transfer and delete all the entries… and am really happy because wordpress rocks!!! and now i can express myself in a much better way.

PS:- 1 major drawback of this tool is the image at the bottom of title and before the content doesn’t gets transferred.