
Reliance’s Ambani Lays Out Plan for Low-Cost Mobile Data in India - kanche
http://www.wsj.com/articles/reliances-ambani-lays-out-plan-for-low-cost-mobile-data-in-india-1472730233
======
zxv
This should be a concern in the US as well. AT&T Uverse is said to be doing
deep packet inspection on all unencrypted traffic unless subscribers pay an
additional ~$744/year to opt-out.

[http://arstechnica.com/information-
technology/2015/03/atts-p...](http://arstechnica.com/information-
technology/2015/03/atts-plan-to-watch-your-web-browsing-and-what-you-can-do-
about-it/2/)

This should be a concern because such data on individual subscribers would be
available to law enforcement and become a potential mechanism for highly
detailed mass surveillance.

~~~
0xmohit
> unless subscribers pay an additional ~$744/year to opt-out

It probably goes on to suggest that this is the amount service providers
expect to benefit per customer by _inspecting_ your data. It's evident that
those (including marketing agencies) who compensate the service providers in
lieu of this data would benefit even more. Creepy world.

------
ap46
Kinda like Valentine from Kingsman.

I'm a bit apprehensive of their executive saying deep packet inspectionn will
be the actual gold mine [[http://qz.com/771690/reliance-jio-bombshell-the-
good-the-bad...](http://qz.com/771690/reliance-jio-bombshell-the-good-the-bad-
and-the-ugly/)]

~~~
0xmohit
Quoting:

    
    
      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.
    

This essentially implies that they would earn more revenues by analyzing one's
browsing behavior, performing analytics and selling the data. Awesome.

Welcome to India!

~~~
shubhamjain
I am not sure if "Big Data" is an accurate idea that fits Reliance's
intentions to kick-start this. Surely, it sounds like a perfect recipe —
onboard millions of customers and sell their 'data' — but on a secondary
inspection it doesn't seems to be a smart idea.

Can you even imagine the scale needed to process this kind of data? That's
petabytes (rough estimate), every day. Maybe, it's theoretically possible but
any investment in this kind of technology would be enormous.

Browsing behaviour data maybe valuable but to what scale? Even a big
advertising firm would balk at spending any big bucks for this and remember,
the scale needed to mine any information out of this. How much valuable
business insights can this generate that wasn't possible in the past?

Maybe I am wrong but I'd be very skeptical if selling is their master plan.

~~~
ismail
speaking from experience with dpi. We did a POC project on analysing dpi data
with hadoop,spark and other big data data tech.

You are right about the volumes, but wrong about it being impractical.

The volumes with a relatively small opco:

\- +-7m subs

\- 250gb just for the protocol classification. *

\- Then you also have url logs etc

Key factors that reduce the costs and investment:

\- commodity hardware (with hadoop etc)

\- distributed

\- query patterns

\- you do not need to store every single record. The data can be aggregated up
to hourly, daily, monthly the older it is

This is what we did, data was aggregated which significantly reduced storage.

Tested various options: Hive, hbase, druid

Edit: * per day

------
abverma
I've been using the network (Jio) for about a month now. The service is great,
but the paranoid in me is genuinely worried about Jio ending up having a
Verizon-NSA like partnership with the Indian Govt. (they probably already
have).

No one will dare question it because we have idiots for politicians and we are
nowhere close to having a privacy law for our citizens.

Is VPN, Whonix, Tor (in essence compartmentalization) a good combination to
escape their monitoring capabilities?

~~~
witty_username
HTTPS will allow them to only see the domain. Tor stops the domain from being
revealed to them.

~~~
Manishearth
Pushing for the entire internet to use https is hard. Pushing for ISPs to be
barred from reading http pages is easier.

My (Indian) landline ISP even _writes_ to http pages, injecting ads for higher
tier internet plans and letting me know that I've reached my data cap (after
which I still have internet, but at a reduced speed).

Tor is good, but slow, and many websites block it or show captchas.

~~~
0xmohit
> My (Indian) landline ISP even writes to http pages, injecting ads for higher
> tier internet plans

I've now gotten used to pages not opening up due to ad-blockers; I refuse to
disable those. It may not be all that bad to shun sites that refuse to display
content upon detecting ad-blockers.

> Tor is good, but slow, and many websites block it or show captchas.

And then you have Cloudflare.

~~~
Manishearth
> It may not be all that bad to shun sites that refuse to display content upon
> detecting ad-blockers

Not sure how this is relevant; I'm talking about my ISP modifying my packets
to include its own ads. The websites have no hand in this aside from the
choice to use http.

While I don't like ads, I personally don't use an adblocker (just Firefox's
tracking protection, which still triggers antiadblock).

------
anilgulecha
This is not what the hype is making it out to be.

The average monthly indian mobile monthly revenue is b/w 150-200rs ($2-$3).
The hype is that a user gets a GB of data for Rs 50 (~$1).

But if you look deeper, that's just the rate of charge/GB. The initial plan is
still Rs 150 per month (for a paltry 0.3GB of data with free voice). This is
better than the current market, but only marginally, not substantially or
revolutionary. Heck that fact that the next big plan is Rs 500, and nothing
between the basic and the next big plan shows they expect a significant number
of users to jump onto the Rs 500 plan. [1]

[1] [http://i.imgur.com/IknpMek.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/IknpMek.jpg)

What's going to happen is the 6 other network providers will huddle in their
respective HQs and come out with equivalent plans within a fortnight.

But definite kudos to Jio for stirring up the market a little.

~~~
perfectstorm
what speed do you get ? where are you located at ?

------
andy_ppp
I watched a premier league game via star sports on 3G on a train from Mumbai
to Goa once. Seemed better than the 3G in London...

~~~
grecy
I'm in West Africa now. The 3G here is much faster than in Canada. Cheaper
too.

~~~
vinay427
To be fair, nearly every country seems to be cheaper than Canada for mobile
service.

------
sudhirj
Non paywalled article by NDTV [http://gadgets.ndtv.com/telecom/news/reliance-
jio-plans-reve...](http://gadgets.ndtv.com/telecom/news/reliance-jio-plans-
revealed-voice-calls-and-roaming-free-rs-50-for-1gb-data-1453073)

~~~
0xmohit
Doesn't show anything if you're using an ad-blocker. Effectively paywalled.

~~~
tmptmp
Yes, but you can use noscript [1] and it works fine then.

[1] [https://noscript.net/](https://noscript.net/)

------
jayadevan
This is huge. Quoting from a piece linked below.

"Now, here’s my not-so-big bet: Jio will not make its magic number of 100
million customers in one year. The person who offers me the best odds before
end of Saturday on a $200 bottle of a single malt is on.

In fact, more from my smoky mirror: Jio will struggle for at least a few years
before it starts making a dent in the telecom market."
[http://goo.gl/hH7Fai](http://goo.gl/hH7Fai)

~~~
captn3m0
Please don't use link-shorteners to hide the link unnecessarily, especially if
it is from your own publication. (I love Factordaily, but this is needless).

Link: [http://factordaily.com/mukesh-ambani-reliance-jio-launch-
imp...](http://factordaily.com/mukesh-ambani-reliance-jio-launch-impact/)

------
pynerds
I hope he will provide some Internet access to rural areas as well. There are
several villages where there is no Internet access or poorer connectivity.

------
gyey
Data is now the new oil according to reliance. "One company insider said the
Jio logo is actually a mirror image of the word ‘oil,’ reflecting in a way
Reliance’s journey from oil drilling to data mining"

------
perseusprime11
Very exciting...I hope this works and they are able to bring half a billion
people in remote areas online. Also interesting that they are future proof so
their Infrastructure is ready for 5G and 6G.

------
meringos
As people are mostly consuming data on mobile plans, doesn't the company get
some of the costs back from peering backbone providers who have to pay to
reach the end users?

------
goombastic
Frankly there is something off about the separation and pricing of internet vs
"internet via wifi/hotspot" on their service.

~~~
rkaranjai
That was always there for US consumers. Now the indian players are adopting it

------
Ronin354
WSJ.com asks to sign in to read full content. Not cool man.

