kishorebhargava

Slashdot | Visual Radio Coming to India Came across this link which talks of more services coming to mobile phones and remembered a little discussion that was going on in an IRC channel a few days ago. Question was which Indian mobile phone provider actually gives a 3G service. I am currently using Airtel, have been for the past few years. I have an EDGE enabled phone, have taken the GPRS service but I don’t think I ever get the kinds of speeds that match the spec! While chatting with a bunch of others I discovered that nobody is getting the kind of performance that is expected of EDGE. So how are these providers going around announcing services like streaming video when just plain data is not fast enough! Here’s a little excerpt from the site:

“India continues to march towards becoming an IT and economic super power. The Indian capital of New-Delhi will become the the third city in the world to have a commercial Visual Radio service after Singapore and Helsinki (Finland). The technology developed by Nokia allows audiences to interact with the radio programs. The audio is received via a regular analog FM radio whereas graphics and text are streamed over a data connection. It will be available to Hutch and Airtel subscribers who have compatible Nokia handsets.”

Slashdot is known for the news it carries and more importantly for the comments that an article generates. I loved the very first comment on this article. “Visual Radio” Don’t they normally call that TV?

Would love to hear from anyone who has been able to get true 3G performance on either Airtel or Hutch.

Cheers…Kishore