False tone

I am sure; some of your friends must have bought a Tata Indicom or Docomo at some point. Do you remember their complaints? If you don’t remember then just call up your friend who had used any of the Tata’s telecom offering and ask them, if they would like to use or let’s say rely on the service (Indicom or Docomo or Virgin) again for their office or their personal work? Also try and recall if you have you ever heard any corporate connection with the services of Tata telecom? My memory fails on any such information.

During college days (like two years back), I remember many of my friends having a reliance connection to talk to their parents, as their parents also had reliance at home. And they would keep a second mobile to call up friends and use locally. This second service would be one of the major three: Airtel, Vodafone (former Hutch) or Idea (then it used to be Spice in Karnataka and Punjab).

Only one friend took Tata Indicom for calling home since it had a better offer. Two months later, the mobile and the service found its way to the dustbin, and the easiest way to infuriate my friend during those days was to ask "How’s the service of Indicom?"

The second time I heard about their service quality was when one of my friends bought Tata Photon, the USB dongle. Well this particular customer was satisfied with the service initially. Till he reached Jamshedpur, also sometimes called as the Tata Steel's city. Apparently the USB didn’t work in the region, I meant in Tata Steel’s city.

So, the simplest way to check out a loser or a winner in the service sector is to crosscheck with about three questions. How good is your service? And how fast can you adapt to technology? Are they using technology to enhance the experience of the customer? And is it worth the cost?

The recent article by Forbes on Tata's telecom business was good. There were lots of information in the article, how the telecom business is run and what Ratan Tata may be thinking. They even tried giving some suggestion of what could happen.

The most interesting part I found was now it plans to merge all of its telecom businesses under a single umbrella. Its still better to be late than never. 

The second interesting information was: "Customers will normally switch to market leaders or if the network has exceptional voice clarity. Tata has neither the leadership nor the right type of network. It has the 1,800 MHz frequency band, which isn't the best for voice clarity and competing on that front will be hard."

And "Worse, it has to pay other operators for carrying traffic for it in some very key markets." This certainly was information for me.

Somehow I felt the conclusion was over dramatised, "Srinath may be an insider but some of these tasks are so tricky that even for someone of his experience, tying up all loose ends may just take too much time. And that's a commodity that might run out for the Tatas even if their money doesn't."

When was the last time when Tata's have closed down a company after investing so much? If you can’t get an answer to that then keep watching.