Reliance Jio Ensures Captive Power Sources and Relief in Affected Areas Reliance Jio has said that it will counter downtime due to power outages in the areas affected by cyclone. The telco has claimed that its towers or network nodes will remain online facilitating communication through its multiway redundancy methodology. The telco has also stacked its captive power sources with diesel or fuel for any unseen eventuality. The company’s Reliance Foundation, has also been working with the disaster management authorities for setting up preventive measures for the cyclone and also for setting up support in at-risk areas in coastal cities....

Telegram, the cloud-based multi-platform messenger app on Thursday introduced a new update with features such as search filter and channel comments. The company also said that the update also includes the ability to support anonymous group admins and that “few more” features will also be made available to the users. Telegram said that the update is intended in enabling the group and channel admins to “make their forums interactive and safer than before....

Telegram is one of WhatsApp’s biggest competitors, who also stole the limelight from the Facebook-owned application during its controversial privacy-related issues. With this, Telegram started to offer lots of features that made it better than WhatsApp, with the exception of one key feature. This feature is about group video calls feature, something that became quite popular over the course of 2020, with more people moving online. WhatsApp decided to increase the number of participants for these calls, whilst Zoom and Google Meet saw increased traffic....

As per recent reports, the messaging platform has been developing sponsored messages that are currently in test mode. It was informed by the CEO of Telegram Pavel Durov informed that WhatsApp messages use the personal data of users even if they don’t display ads and the new feature from telegram won’t be like that. Moreover, the sponsored messages on Telegram will be available to users on large public channels that have more than 1000 subscribers and the messages will have a character limit of 160 words....

Telstra, a major Australian telecommunications company, has been sued by the Australian Competition & Consumer Commission (ACCC) for allegedly downgrading the broadband upload speed for customers. The said incident took place between October and November 2020. The issue was that the company didn’t inform them about the downgrade in speed to the customers, and neither lowered the charges. According to Reuters, ACCC has taken Telstra to the Federal Court because of this....

Android 11 Beta is being rolled out to various devices. Google announced the Android 11 Beta update to various Pixel devices earlier this week. As we have seen over the last couple of years, non-Google devices have started receiving Android 11 update. Android 11 will bring various new features, but some of the features which Google has especially focused on are the notifications, enhanced privacy option and new power menu....

Video conferencing has become the backbone of nearly every industry for conducting meetings, seminars or classes. Since the government announced a lockdown period to tackle the deadly virus, work from home became the new normal. Nearly every corporate organisation announced work from home for employees to ensure complete safety. Not only this, but school and colleges started taking online classes. The Covid-19 scare resulted in the growth of various video conferencing apps to cater to the different needs of customers....

Our smartphones are loaded with a ton of apps. There are different apps for different purposes. The sole aim of these apps is to make your life easy. Now you can do most of the things sitting in your home with these apps for which you had to go out and stand in lines for hours a few years back. Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) is offering its own channel selector app....

Testing for Interoperability Successfully Completed in Lab Conditions Following the timeline which Trai has traced on the matter of Set-Top Box interoperability, we get to know that back in 2016, the sector regulator had floated a pre-consultation in this matter during April 2016 Thereafter, a consultation note on solution architecture developed by C-DoT for the technical interoperable Set-Top Box was issued during August 2017. Now, as per the latest release from Trai, the smart card based solution has been successfully tested in lab conditions, “using separate instances of CAS developed by C-DoT....

Telcos Could Be Able to Save 40% on Capital Expenses As per the estimates charted out by the industry, if the regulator’s move goes through, then there could be around 40% savings on capital expense by telecom service providers. In August, the telecom regulator also put together a consultation paper which was aimed at reviewing the scope of infrastructure providers, or IP-I entities. These entities are aimed at providing towers on rent or sale to licensed telcos, in addition to other assets like dark fibre and duct space....

Cable TV Operators Against Interoperability AIDCF also went ahead to say, “We, therefore request Authority to hold the present consultation paper.” The digital cable federation also noted that the combination of compression, encryption, middleware, Conditional Access System (CAS), and EPG is what makes the Set-Top Box capable of delivering the current set of features. As such, any Set-Top Box cannot be 100% interoperable with the same features and services. AIDCF also put forth the thought that the differentiating things that set apart the DPOs offering are based on the Set-Top Box only....

The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) will soon start working on a new mechanism that will display the name (registered during KYC process) of the caller on the receiver’s phone. The regulatory body has already received a reference for the same from the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) and will soon start consultation. According to a PTI report, the consultation for this mechanism will being in a few months. PD Vaghela, chairman, TRAI said that they will start working on this soon and the name as per KYC will appear when someone calls....

Twitter rolled out the new Twitter Blue subscription after the problems that occurred when the service was launched a few weeks back with the Blue tick badge bundled. Twitter had to stop the subscription service because of impersonators, which everyone had expected would happen. Now, to distinguish between the official organisations and people who are carrying blue ticks, Twitter has rolled out a Golden tick. This golden tick can’t be purchased and would only be given to the accounts which are official handles of big organisations....

Twitter has just introduced the ‘Tip-Jar’ feature for users in India. The micro-blogging platform will leverage Razonpay’s technology to support its ‘Tip-Jar’ feature in India. Through the new feature, users can make payments to freelancers, non-government organisations, new media professionals, journalists, content creators, and more. The best thing is, Twitter won’t take a cut out of these payments in any manner. Twitter Rolls Out ‘Tip-Jar’ Feature With Razorpay in India According to an ET Telecom report, Twitter was in the beta phase of the feature with Razorpay....

To inform about the whole issue, Google posted a blog post which mentioned, “To remediate the Chrome vulnerability (CVE-2019-5786), Google released an update for all Chrome platforms on March 1; this update was pushed through Chrome auto-update. We encourage users to verify that Chrome auto-update has already updated Chrome to 72.0.3626.121 or later.” Google Chrome Bug: What is it Actually? Google has informed that the vulnerability CVE-2019-5786 has been fixed in the latest Chrome version pushed out by the company....

After rebranding Vodafone Idea to Vi, the telco has made some changes to its prepaid offerings as well. Not only the prepaid plans come with new benefits but some new plans have been added as well. One newly added prepaid plan is the Rs 351 work from home data add-on pack. It offers double the benefits of what Rs 251 work from home data add-on pack does. So now it becomes interesting to look at the prepaid plans from Vi and see the unique benefits which they are offering....

India’s private telecom operator Vodafone Idea has witnessed a downfall in the growth rate of its 4G subscriber base. However, the company doesn’t really seem to be concerned about the slowing subscriber growth as the Managing Director of the Vodafone Idea Ravinder Takkar thinks that the reason behind some of the subscribers leaving the service is because of the recent tariff hikes and SIM consolidation. To recall Vodafone Idea or Vi had opted for tariff hikes along with other telcos back in November of 2021....

Vivo launched X70 Pro and X70 Pro Plus in September as a part of its X70 series in India. It appears that Vivo would also be coming up with a sequel to the X70 series in India which will be the Vivo X80 series. If sources are to be believed, the new X80 series from Vivo may hit Indian markets in the month of January or February next year. Though there isn’t a lot of details available about the upcoming series, it is speculated that the X80 series will feature two models which don’t include the base model....

The Chinese smartphone manufacturer Vivo has launched its latest Vivo T1 5G smartphone in India. The device has been launched just a week after its specification details surfaced over the web. The company claims that Vivo T1 5G is the slimmest 5G smartphone available in the mid-range segment which includes devices below Rs 20,000. The newly launched device comes with a Qualcomm processor as well as a triple rear camera setup....

Chinese smartphone brand, Vivo, has officially launched its first flagship smartphone for 2021, aka the Vivo X60 Pro+. Powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon 888 5G chipset, the X60 Pro+ is the premium smartphone in the Vivo X60 series which already has the standard Vivo X60 and the Vivo X60 Pro. The Vivo X60 and X60 Pro phones are powered by Exynos 1080 chipset. It is the fourth smartphone in the world after Xiaomi Mi 11, iQOO 7 and Samsung Galaxy S21 to ship with Snapdragon 888 5G SoC....