Ok, we don’t know how consumers think about Airtel but one company does reckon they are the best service provider, not in India but the whole Asia-Pacific region. Frost and Sullivan, a US based telecom research and consultancy firm recently bestowed India’s largest telecom operator with this tag.

In a company statement this Tuesday, Bharti Airtel’s chief executive and joint managing director Manoj Kohli said, “Our company has been recognized for its overall service quality and has been adjudged the service provider of the year in the “Best of the Best” category. The awards recognise Bharti Airtel’s commitment to technology and business innovation, and globally benchmarked quality of services.”

Amongst others, Vietnam’s telecom major Viettel has been named as the best emerging markets’ service provider. Unfortunately, no other Indian telecom service provider made it to these awards.

We are all well versed with Virgin Mobile’s USP of paying its users for calling other Virgin numbers, which might have worked wonders for them. Because here is another crazy plan by the operator and this time around, it’s paying you to surf the net. Here is how it works:

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We brought you some cool plans Aircel has on offer for Mumbai users in our exclusive review of PostPaid Plans (Mumbai), and here is a follow up to that one with the add-on packs, which one can opt for along with the postpaid plans. The operator has managed to create a need for these packs by keeping SMS rates at Re.1 for all its plans.

Here are some of the packs you can choose from: Continue Reading…

Blyk’s been in the news recently because it plans to enter India. Their announcement of entering the Indian telecom scene is not surprising but its way of functioning is intriguing, which is different than the regular cellular operators. Its works as an MVNO (currently in UK and Netherlands) and offers free talktime and other freebies for viewing ads on the phone. Now one would expect the same MVNO model to be followed here but this is what they said when we contacted them.

Blyk will not work as an MVNO, but as Blyk Media, partnering with mobile operators in all countries where we have presence or will expand to.

We further asked if Blyk will devise some other means for users to earn credits but was returned with “no further details”. They are neither confirming nor denying anything which makes us to do nothing but wait for them to let loose some new details.

Economic Times is reporting that TRAI will be seeking views from stakeholders and experts on the possible tariffs for the MNP service.

We will issue a consultation paper next week on the port and dipping charges of mobile number portability (MNP) service … We will have to see the service is affordable to customers.

Now that they “really” want the service to be affordable to us, we thought of asking the customers directly. So we want to know how much are you willing to pay for such a service. Select your option in the poll below. We really want to know what you think.

PS: If you’re wondering what MNP is all about, read over here.

We bring you an exclusive review of the postpaid plans on offer by Aircel for Mumbai users. Overall, we think the operator has introduced a good set of plans and here is each one of them broken down to the basics for you. 

The operator has 4 plans in all, the basic differentiators being the usage of the user. 

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