Airtel continues to shower its love on subscribers in Delhi & NCR region. Today they have announced an SMS Dhamaka pack for the prepaid users that can help them to reduce their monthly SMS tariff. There are basically five options starting with just Rs. 13 and going up to Rs. 112.

Packs:
Rs. 13 – 30 SMS free (Local)
Rs. 42 – 100 SMS free (Local & National)
Rs. 46 – 200 SMS free (Local)
Rs. 94 – 250 SMS free (Local & National)
Rs. 112 – 1112 SMS free (Local)

All the packs carry a validity of 30 days and are applicable to lifetime as well as non-lifetime customers.

If the recent proposal from the Indian Cellular Association (ICA) to Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) is approved, 50M below the poverty line (BPL) families could receive a free phone along with a cellular connection.

The initiative put forth by the ICA which includes members like Nokia, Motorola, Sony Ericsson is pretty interesting with an aim to further penetrate rural areas as well as disseminate local information like weather, news etc. with the help of call centres in the regional languages. ICA plans to provide a basic phone with AM Radio functionality and a free calling package of up to 100 calls per month/family for a period of 2 years. The total estimated cost of this initiative is expected to be around Rs. 4000-5000 crores.

However, all this totally depends on TRAI’s approval and looking at their way of working this seems to be a tough ask.

Source

A quick note to inform all our readers that Airtel has posted a small note of caution on their website about an unsolicited fraud SMS. It asks the users to ignore the message as a reply to it could cost them up to Rs. 500. Ouch! Full text below:

Unsolicited fraudulent SMS’s are being sent to various subscribers informing them that they have won a prize and need to call an international number to collect their prize. When calls are made to the number in the text message the subscribers are billed a high amount (upto Rs 500 per minute).Subscribers are cautioned not to respond to such SMS’s.

It’s a good thing that Airtel is notifying its customers but looks like a half-hearted attempt from them. Sending an SMS to its subscribers would prevent gullible users from getting fooled.

PS: If you have received the message or have replied to the same, do let us know in the comments.

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Aditya Birla Group led Idea Cellular is all set to enter 5 new circles. These would include West Bengal, Kolkatta, North East, Assam and J&K. With the operator’s services being well appreciated by users across the country, it has set its eyes on these circles. The deadline currently stands at end of 2009. Also, it has rebranded Spice (Taken over by Idea) as Idea Cellular in Punjab and Karnataka, where the former had its presence. Apart from the north, Idea also has its eyes set on Orissa and Tamil Nadu, which would strengthen its presence down under. However, this is planned to happen in the first half of 2010.  The moves come after Idea has succeeded in acheiving healthy growth for the recent quarter.

Airtel has announced that its service mChek has successfully crossed the one million users benchmark. For those of you who are not aware of the service, mChek is a service which makes payments easy through SMS. Be it any kind of transaction – paying bills, buying tickets, etc. your bill is settled through an SMS.

On this successful achievement, Airtel has added some additional aspects to its application, thus helping users to do more. These include:

• mChekMall: a virtual mall on WAP environment, using which a user can buy movie, travel tickets, etc.
• All the sim cards will have the application pre-installed in them so as to make the service available to entry level handset users too.
• More offers and discounts Continue Reading…