Switching Frenzy?
I just dropped by wataniya today to check wat it was all abt... man.. couldnt believe my eyes... is everyone genuinely trying to switch? or is it the general Maldivian tendency to kulhibelun...
well so much for me being able to check out wataniya's service today..... its hard to even get into the place.... personally i think they should have opened up temporary outlets.. Kiosks or watever.... to handle the demand...
hmmm reminds me.. wat was that abt someone not being able to watch TVM on their wataniya mobile?.. heh... personally i would prefer MTV or VH1....
but wouldnt be that hard now would it? wataniya has a 3G network in the male' region.. dosent seem that far fetched to stream media... they certianly should have the required bandwidth capacity to do so... i've seen it done elsewhere...
nywyas... hmmm oh the crowds..
One of wataniya's ads... simply put..
"get through the first time"....
finally does this mean that we'll not have to listen to that dumb message from dhiraagu?...remains to be seen...
It has Begun!!!
Well, the day is finally here.... wataniya has come into the picture... dhiraagu is... well playing the dirtiest game as well as it can.. heh... granted when i say that the response from dhiraagu would prolly be that its all marketing.. image change, and blah blah yadda yadda... sure the price reductions are a welcome one... but the timing... god knows how many time dhiraagu dropped prices within july itself....
now when i say that its not coz i dont mind the reduction in prices.... its all good for the final customer.. but it does seem a bit unfair to the competition.. this time wataniya.. i mean in all fairness they should be given the opportunity to settle down... and show the public what they have.... isnt that what happened when focus infocom came in with the internet?
sure.. the argument there being forcus inforcom is a Maldivian company and wataniya is not an so therefore dhiraagu shouldn’t stay an let them settle down... well BULL to that... dhiraagu has been having the chance to do whatever they wanted for over 2o something years.... whatever happened to reducing prices?
if someone looked around... im pretty sure there has been more price reductions in the mobile tariffs since wataniya was given the contract to be the second mobile provider... and more so over the past few months.. in terms of service and prices.... which is also a good thing.... but the important point is this...
I haven’t forgotten how dhiraagu has been charging ( exploiting ) the public over the years... an i'll be darned if i forget that jus coz dhiraagu reduces the prices by a few laari; what they have been doing over the years...
having said that... i do hope wataniya is able to play upto the expectations of the people who switch... this remains to be seen... but i'm def in the group who wants to give them the chance to prove themselves...
i've also had enuf of dhiraagu tellin me, that the number i called is either not in range, or all their circuits are busy, or its switched off, or that the number must have been eaten up by the loch ness monster... seriously.. they really dont have a clue what happens to their numbers do they?
anyways... i love one of the new wataniya ads... " get thru the first time " ... lets see if they live up to this...
I'm switching tomorow... time to start sharing... ;)
Dhiraagu set to reduce prices again?
Wow... this is interesting... i jus found out that dhiraagu is now set to reduces its mobile prices again.....
wataniya just annouced today their packages and pricing.. i havent been able to get a hold of a list yet... but as soon as i get them... hmmm
anyways.. the following are supposedly the dhiraagu's new pricing structure...
also the connection for dhiraagu has already been reduced from 500 to 199....
i also heard that the SMS rate is going to be reduced to 20 laari as well.. but thats jus for dhiraagu to dhiraagu mobiles... remains to be seen...
anyways... thought this might be interesting... wonder when these rates will become effective???
Update details available at: http://www.tam.gov.mv/articles.php?artID=21
IS THE BIGGEST COMMUNICATION GIANT IN MALDIVES A VICTIM OF MISCOMMUNICATION?
-Contributor Article Received by email-
By: UdjatCommunication simply means that the sender sends a message which is received by the receiver correctly and the receiver understands the information exactly the same as the sender has send.
For a company like Dhiraagu they should have and must be familiar with this basic of communitcation. The latest step they have taken has proved to my understanding that they have not received the message their customers wanted all these years.
I don’t have any statistics to prove that there are more customers wanting to change their logo and image then customers who want to reduce the price of their services. If this is true then surely Dhiraagu has been a victim of miscommunication.
Over the television and radio I heard that the main purpose of this change is to update to be more modernised. This is the same reason why they have changed their logo. I may be wrong and I truly agree different people have different perception about the logo. In my view the logo has taken a step backward and not a step forward. Logically thinking when civilisation started people used their hands to do work. As they become more civilised they started using tools. The previous logo shows a tool used for communication but now it’s just the hand. Like I said before my view may be different from others and mine is just an opinion. This time I must admit I am a victim of miscommunication.
I must give credit to their marketing effort carried by them to compete against their ONLY competitor even before they started their operations. The main aim of the huge marketing campaign was to change their image for better. In my view their whole campaign back fired on them. The reaction of the whole people was that all their efforts were “a desperate measure” to survive because Wataniyyaa is going to take over their market. The whole campaign proved how insecure Dhiraagu is; and how few “loyal customers” they have. Wataniyyaa’s marketing team should be grateful to Dhiraagu for providing them free publicity. I just wonder whether Dhiraagu has a marketing team who do brainstorming or even the marketing department is monopolised by one person. Surely, a company would have thought the pros and cons of such a campaign.
Sometimes I wonder whether it is a message to the new competitor “STOP! THIS IS AS FAR AS YOU WOULD GO”. Whatever it is they should welcome new competition. This would show us – the public, how good they really are. A healthy competition is good for everyone and I know there are much more academically qualified people then just me. I just hope they don’t follow the Adam Smith’s theory in competing; which fighting for the first place but instead follow John Nash’s theory of equilibrium and use their competitive edge more evenly so that it is beneficial to all of us.
Back to the logo and it makes me wonder what it’s all about? It must be something really big with a deep meaning because it took two years to come up with that. What is it about the colour red? Maybe they think we are Spanish Bulls who will run after bright red. Here again they have been a victim of miscommunication because this is not Spain and we are NOT BULLS.
-Contributor Article Received by email-
Thoughts on the proposed submarine cables!
( larger image available at http://www.cybergeography.org/atlas/alcatel_large.gif)
Last week dhiraagu announced that they were going to lay an international submarine cable.. And following suit Wataniya and Focus Infocom to lay another cable..
Well I’d have to say about time!!! I can’t even begin to imagine how much easier life would be for people like us if these two projects are successful... and by being successful I mean the benefits of this being available for consumers like us at a reasonable price... of coz..
This might finally mean availability of services that we have been dreaming of.... more importantly the usability of services that we have been dreaming of...
True we say we have "broadband" internet service available at the moment... sure .. there are packages which state 256kbps all the way upto 1Mbps too..... but anyone who has been using them knows that we hardly ever get the speed stated... sure we might get this speed up to the ISP servers... maybe close to that when accessing local servers.... but almost never to international traffic... mainly cos the INTERNATIONAL bandwidth is shared.... and sometimes shared so much that the speed stated becomes insignificant...
take the dhiraagu "baraboa" package for example.. The ADSL home user package that they have been marketing as 256/64 kbps... the contention on that package according to TAM (http://www.tam.gov.mv/articles.php?artID=21) is 1:200.... now wat does this 1:200 figure have to do with speed...???
well my understanding of contention leads me to believe that this 1:200 means that the stated 256Kbps is allocated for around 200 users. and increased in the same ratio... so this could mean that at any given time your so called 256kbps connected is shared among 199 other 256kbps connections... which is of coz.. very misleading to an average consumer....pls correct me if im wrong....
Focus Infocom also probably has a similar level of connection sharing but I don’t have any figures for them....
Anyways... what's gonna happen when these two cables are in operation?.... well I haven’t a clue abt whats gonna happen.. but I have my opinions on what should happen....
As dhiraagu has been so kind to point out in their press release Maldives is gonna have "unlimited capacity".. which I doubt.. but yes.. a heck of a lot more... capacity in terms of carrying data in and out of the country... double that with two cables and this could actually mean we are going to be able to have true broadband...
Now.. with satellite transmission of data.. the inevitable lag... or latency has been a major issue... satellites are a lot slower than the submarine cables for transmitting and receiving data so it is SLOW... this lag issue has prevented a lot of value added services from being properly deployed in the country... the most important service for me is VOIP... ability to play games online.... etc.. did i forget to mention that satellite traffic is wayyyyyyyy costly compared to traffic on cable?.... hmm well it is.. so.. are we gonna get a lower price to reflect that?
now VOIP means "Voice over IP".. which is ( in internet context ) jus another fancy way of saying that your voice is sent over the internet.... anyways.. its just equivalent to talking over the internet... sure we can talk over the internet now.. using MSN messenger, Yahoo Messenger etc....but most of us would have experienced this delay... most of the time seems like we're talking on a walkie talkie.... and even then there are cracks in the voice transmission... which makes it bothersome and even frustrating to talk over the internet...
with the latency issues gone... and with increased capacity.. we might be able to make proper use of VOIP... this would prove to be extremely useful for businesses and homes who has to make overseas calls on a regular basis.... if u have a good internet connection u could cut off your phone bill drastically by using VOIP services.... coz then you wouldn’t have to use your Telco to make phones over the traditional phone network...
if u are calling someone lets say in the UK... and both of you has internet.. the cost of making a call from your computer to computer would be.. nothing extra.... the cost of internet is all ud be paying... there are really good computer to computer VOIP services available... including Skype..which is one of my personal favorites... the sound quality is awesome... you could also make calls from your compute to someone else’s regular telephone using the internet for darn cheap prices.... like around less than MRF 1 a min for the USA and many other countries... compare that to the price we have to pay now...
anyways enough about VOIP.... even general surfing....and video conferencing its almost impossible to watch a good streaming video at 300kbps without it dropping frames even on a 512kbps connection in Male'... aah how I long for a day when I can watch the music videos at yahoo launch without dropping frames....
Now I’m not too sure why they decided to lay two different cables, one good cable would have provided enough bandwidth to cover the total existing bandwidth of Maldives a few hundred times over... but I’m not complaining... two is always better than one... specially if these two cables are connected to two different backbones.. and they play nice and share the combined bandwidth... or is that asking for too much :)
so.. all in all... im very excited abt this submarine cable proposal.... I jus hope we get to enjoy the benefits..
Adobe Creative Suite 2 .. "CS2"
Theres not much hype abt the new creative suite 2 as it was for the CS1... to be frank as a designermyslef, i dont see much different for a normal photoshop user, but in a more serious photoshop users point of view, there are some pretty good additions. here i will be just mentioning the basic new stuff on CS2...
* a sample word next to the font name in that font is a good change. lets the user know how the font really looks like and saves a bit of time.
* multiple layers can be selected in layers palette by just using Cntrl button or Shift button and right clicking as we do normally in windows.
*The file browser which was first inreoduced in Photoshop 7 and improved in CS1 is now called " Adobe Bridge" in CS2. The good thing abt this is that the files can be accessed via other Creative Suite applications as well. Also bridge can be run as a standalone application.
* improvement in the version cue, which is pretty helpful when working on larger projects expecially as a team .this is integrated with Adobe Bridge.
well these are just the basic stuff which i came across the new version, but i believe there are a lot of new features in CS2 for digital photographers and maybe i will just try have a look at them later and do a little summary!.. CS2 havent really had my attention that much , i still prefer to use CS and i did use version 7 till very recently..
The last confrontation!
2 days back i had the chance to discuss the new "dhiraagu" logo with a senior dhiraagu official and im very happy he tried to explain the concept behind the new design which we all believe is "sumeh"!! here i will highlight the mail points which i am able to remember, and the wordings does not resemble the same words used by him.. heh *In the previous logo ,
2 days back i had the chance to discuss the new "dhiraagu" logo with a senior dhiraagu official and im very happy he tried to explain the concept behind the new design which we all believe is "sumeh"!! here i will highlight the mail points which i am able to remember, and the wordings does not resemble the same words used by him.. heh *In the previous logo , the BLUE globe was supposed to be representing cable & wireless, while the RED "sangu" represented the maldives. *Now, since maldives has got a much bigger share than C&W, it was about time the logo represented the maldives more than the C&W. * In the modern days, the hand seems to be the most important communicating medium, more than the voice even.. sms, chatting etc.... so the new hand resembles that! * The red color as i stated before, represents the maldives.. and NOT any conspiracy theory to steal the color of Wataniyya or anyplace else. * The most imprtant point is, yes we are talking so much abt the new dhiraagu logo right? but to be honest they are the ones who are profitting from it, coz the more we talk abt the "ugly" new logo, the more "dhiraagu" is gonna come up in our conversation and that is some new marketting strategy i guess!hehe.... .. and it might go to a limit where we will be reminded of dhiraagu whenever we see our own hands :)
