Mobile telephony

A study of the pricing of mobile telephony is essentially an analysis of elements driving survival of business in hyper competitive, capex intensive, technology centric businesses. Pricing is an essential ingredient of the strategy for growth and survival of operators at individual level as well as for the overall sectoral growth. Under perfect competition, the prices tend to move towards marginal costs. However, facing an exceptionally fierce competition, Indian mobile telephony service providers are driven by a long-term survival strategy of customer acquisition & increasing market share; and the services are being offered at significant discount to marginal costs leading to huge losses to operators. In this paper, quarterly data on price and demand have been used to regress two types of demand functions-a quadratic polynomial function and an exponential function with pricing as an independent variable. Further, the operators are assumed to follow revenue maximization (RM) strategy and price point leading to revenue maxima for the regressed demand function is predicted as the service price in the following time period. It is noted that from March 2008 to Sept 2016, the revenue maximization assumption yields service price close to the actuals. However, in subsequent quarters (after the entry of Reliance Jio in market), the prices were not driven by RM strategy but by the survival need of operators. As a result, the mobile telephony service prices in this period are not just lower than marginal costs but also lower than what is required for revenue maximization.

The future of mobile telephony is expected to rely on mobile services and the use of mobile services will be an integral part of the revenues to be generated by third generation mobile telephony. The adoption of new mobile services contradicts this proposition as it has ...

Recent studies conclude that early and specialized prehospital management contributes to emergency case survival. Ambulance personnel, who usually are the first to handle emergency situations, do not have the required theoretical knowledge and experience. Financial and practical reasons do not allow the participation of specialized physicians on ambulance vehicles. Within the framework of the health telematics programme, we have developed a portable medical device that allows telediagnosis, long distance support and teleconsultation of mobile health care providers by specialized physicians. The device allows the transmission of vital biosignals and still images of the patient from the incident place to the hospital. The transmission is performed through the GSM mobile telephony network. The device can telematically “bring” a specialist doctor to the site of the medical emergency, allow him to evaluate patient data and issue directions to the emergency personnel on treatment procedures until the patient is brought to hospital. Due to the need for storing and archiving data being interchanged during the telemedicine sessions, we have equipped the consultation site with a multimedia database able to store and manage the data collected by the “AMBULANCE” system. The performance of the system has been validated in four different countries using a controlled medical protocol