[cr-india] "misuse" of telecom by pirate radio and others

[Arun Mehta]

At 01-10-03, Monica Narula wrote:
>There is a studio mobile too. It vibrates every few seconds like a faulty
>alarm clock, as listeners call and text. Scrolling through its inbox, I
>notice scores of "missed calls". Big N explains that this is how pirates
>gauge a record's popularity. If listeners like a tune, they call in and
>then ring off, so the studio mobile registers a "missed call". This costs
>callers nothing. If Xtreme receives over 20 missed calls from different
>numbers before a track ends, the DJs play it again. This is why teenagers
>listen to pirate radio: it's interactive in ways legal stations can't
>match.

I love stories like this -- an early adopter of the mobile phone, as I 
mentioned on india-gii, was a vegetable seller, who parked her cart under a 
tree, waiting for her customers to call. From caller-ID, she knew who was 
calling, so she just hung up, and pushed her cart to that house. No 
shouting all day, as other vegetable sellers had to do.

Of course, the mobile companies must hate this -- people using the phones 
and not paying. The problem is, that setting up a network is highly capital 
intensive, but do not charge you up-front as much as it costs them per 
customer. They make up the capital cost, and hopefully more, by charging 
you much more than it costs them, for each call.

I myself used to "misuse" their network in a similar way while a student in 
the US. My brother lived 80 km away, and if I wasn't going to his house on 
Friday evening as planned, but only the next morning, I would book a 
collect call to his number for Mr. "Kal Subey." If my brother understood, 
he would refuse the call, if the American operators' accent was too weird, 
he'd accept it...

If the Internet treats censorship as a fault and routes around it, it is 
because it was made by ordinary people, and this is how they have always 
fought against the powers that be (censorship defined as anything that gets 
between me and the information I want).
Arun

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