| On 11.19.09, In Uncategorized, by venus |
Whenever we talk about the Indian Telecom industry, the top guns firing their services in the market are Bharti Airtel
, BSNL and Reliance Communications with Vodafone slowly gearing up for considerable market share. Rural to urban areas to the biggest metropolitan cities, the services keep you connected with the world on the go.But what comes as a surprise to me is that these market pros are loosing out on their internet traffic proving themselves as a noob on internet domain name use. What am I talking about? Well let me explain.
We all are aware of the Domain Name System of hierarchal naming for computer services or any resource connected to the Internet or a private network often referred to as the Phone Book of internet. The internet domain names have been used by companies and organization as the identification label to define a realm of administrative autonomy, authority or control in the internet.
However the telecom hot shots seem to be missing out some aspects when it comes to naming their sites. As the busy lives take a quick shortcut to the dot com world with Cntrl+ Enter, you may not be guaranteed to reach your desired destination.
Getting straight to the point let me begin with our recent Twitter partnered Airtel. As expected by majority of users, clicking onto www.airtel.com should drive them to the Airtel home page. But to their surprise it opens into a Vodafone site with Spanish text. In order to access the actual Airtel home page a little effort of typing www.airtel.in may accompany.
As per my knowledge ever since the domain names have existed, there have been two major categories right from the start named country code and generic for top level domains. Also as www became popular and site operators wished to have a memorable address the .com domain became the one widely used.
A company like Airtel still chose the country code domain inspite of the .com preference by users , well no comments on that. But airtel.com landing on a Vodafone site raises a big question. Either Airtel is unaware of the traffic loss to its site as a consequence to it or does not seem to care at all.
Joining the league is our next telecom brand name BSNL. www.bsnl.com is again not owned by BSNL but takes you to a North London Directory of health, fitness and sports in UK. Apart from this BSNL’s www.bsnl.co.in to your dismay is rather more cluttered, haphazard and quite unprofessional to stand for such major market sharing telecom operator.
Relatively the Airtel and Vodafone sites are much more accessible when it comes to their design and layout. But leading all of them is Reliance Communications with a clean outlook and interface. Also whether you type in “reliancecommunications+cntrl+Enter” or www.rcom.com both point to the same location. But again a small loop hole is that www.reliance.com belongs to an electrical company.
The amount of traffic and business lost by these telecom operators because of the domain name confusion may well be seen. So why have these telecom giants shut their eyes and have not taken any measures yet? Companies should buy all the related domains and secure its interest in Web. The action of buying all domain names related to a keyword is called Domain Ring Fencing. For e.g. Airtel should buy all domain names like Airtel.com, Airtel.co.in, Airtel.net, Airtel.biz etc. This is a usual job for serious internet players, and is practiced mostly by American good house companies.
Bhupendra Khanal, CEO InRev Systems Bangalore said,” Indian Companies are far behind in doing this and it is surprising that even Telecom majors have ignored the fact. I can’t imagine companies selling internet services not being serious on these web practices.”
The Telecom sector in India is experiencing a fierce competition in both segments of fixed line and mobile telephony. Reduction in tariffs and slashed down prices of handsets are likely to lead even more people going for cellular and more value added services. In such situations ignoring such important aspect may hamper the business growth of companies. Realizing the marketing and business potential of these online services, requires some immediate action and take steps to serve users’ needs to the fullest.
Image Source: Asian Correspondent.
Home page Image Source: http://technongadget.files.wordpress.com/2008/11/telecom.jpg
One Response
Airtel.com’s redirection to Vodafone EU is the funniest ever thing. Similar to being Noob-ish in domain name use, Indian Telecoms and ISPs are more noob-ish on the working of a technology (EDGE, ADSL, WiMAX and the likes). Selection of customer representatives should be based on what they know about a technology than stressing on their English fluency, though it plays a major part.