Nokia has been expanding from its handset manufacturing niche to a new media agency for advertising on mobile phone applications and websites. In other words, the network will offer advertising on the mobile internet and innovative ad units within mobile applications. For this initiative, Nokia has roped in a deal with Airtel to show ads in India. This means we can see ads showing up on Airtel’s Live page or even be promoted to download free Nokia apps like Mosh, Widsets and so on.

The success rate totally depends on the number of mobile internet users but Nokia is optimistic of getting a high clickthrough rate (CTR) of 10%.

Nokia Advertising

Remember TRAI’s initiative for full talk time on top-ups? Well the date for compliance was yesterday and Airtel officially announced to be the first private one to reduce processing charges. From now, Airtel prepaid users will only have to pay Rs. 2 to Airtel as administrative charges and the applicable service tax. Other operators will follow the compliance order soon.

UPDATE: Government’s own MTNL has also taken the plunge and now charges processing fees not more than Rs. 2.

Let’s make it simple and straight. We all boasted about buying the iPhone to our friends and this took an ugly turn on August 22nd. All praises for the phone were suddenly hard to find and all people spoke about was how it would dig a hole in their pocket if they had to buy one.

The only option, take it on installments. A not so great way to sell the unaccepted phone. Here are the details of how Airtel and Vodafone have planned to sell it in their own ways:

Bharti Airtel 

Airtel is offering multiple options to interested buyers. They have tied up with ICICI, HDFC, SBI and Citibank to provide the 3G machine on installments. As for the duration, people can have 3-24 months to pay their EMI’s, which ranges from Rs.1654 to Rs.12033. Click here to check the available options.

Vodafone

Vodafone, on the other hand was only providing a single option to buyers. The duration proposed by the service provider was 12 months. UPDATE: Now the EMI ranges from 3 -12 months. The banks who are partnering Vodafone in this are Axis, Barclays, HSBC and Citibank. Click here to view the updated available options. 

Bharti Airtel will be soon seen providing its services to our southern neighboring island, Sri Lanka. The company is looking to launch itself anytime before the end of this year if they are able to sort out interconnection issues. The Airtel has accused local operators like Dialog, Hutch, Mobitel and Tigo for being anticompetitive in nature and not allowing interconnection to its network. The problem will obviously be resolved soon but do you remember Airtel? You did the same thing to another operator, a few weeks before? The old saying, ‘Jaisi karni waisi bharni’ seems apt here.

Since early days of Airtel, they have been targeting youths by rolling out cheap tariff based cards. First came the MTV, then Friendz and now it’s the Mobile Campus Pack. A user needs to buy a new SIM card if he wants to enjoy Night and weekend calling rates at 25 paise and SMS at 10 paise. But if he is sufficed with his tariff and still want to be a part of Airtel’s Mobile Campus community, he can send a SMS mcampus to 54321. The message will give him a link of Mobile Campus WAP site wherein he can do a lot of things like sending SMS to phone over WAP, upload photos and videos, blog and in return earn points for rewards.

Another good thing over here is users can surf the Campus WAP site free of charge with Airtel Live as their access point. Contact 121 for more details.

WAP site

Airtel Mobile Campus

Now a days, majority of the users feel the need to check their unbilled usage amounts, like their prepaid counterparts. The need for such a service was quite high and each postpaid user feels secure if he can constantly check his unbilled amounts and have a rough estimate on his usage.

Airtel has provided a list of codes, which would help its users to do the same.

• OT - Outstanding
• UNB - Unbilled usage
• PYMT - Payment details
• MBILL - Bill Summary
• BP - Current Bill Plan
• NBP - Info on new Plans
• START<space><BILL PLAN SHORT NAME> - Change Bill Plan
• SR<space><REQUEST REFERENCE No.> - Service Request Status

The users can send the respective codes to 121 (toll free). This move hits two birds with one stone. Firstly, users can ask for anything at their discretion and secondly, less people standing in queues at their Relationship Centers. What an Idea!.

Another reason for Indians to be proud of; India’s largest private telecom company, Bharti Airtel has crossed the 75 million customer mark to become the fourth largest in-country mobile operator in the world.

The subscriber base includes customers from all business units of Airtel–mobile services, telemedia services and enterprises services. The mobile services division has a customer base of 72.07 million as of July, 2008.

Bharti Airtel is now behind China Mobile, China Unicom and American AT&T in terms of subscriber base. China Mobile has 414.5 million customers as on June 2008 followed by China Unicom with 170.7 million subscriber base.

Our sleuth hiding in one of the Airtel offices has discovered something important which we all had been waiting for the past 2 weeks. In a short breath he spilled some juicy details on iPhone 3G pricing as well as on other things. The 8GB iPhone 3G will cost in a price bracket of Rs. 15,000 ($350) – Rs. 18,000 ($420) and 16GB will be close (mostly under) to Rs. 30,000 ($700). So let us please trash the previous pricing rumors. However, the contractual details are still unclear.

The iPhone 3G’s monthly rent will be under Rs. 1000 (~900). That’s expensive but worthy to give you one of the best browsing experience. Unlike normal Airtel users visiting Airtel Live!, iPhone users will have an exclusive portal. We just hope it’s not an optimized version of Airtel Live! though.

Lastly, on a marketing note, Airtel will pitch the 16GB more by luring people with some enticing offers. The 8GB does not get this benefit.

After giving some relief to the prepaid users with its Independence Day offer, Airtel turn themselves in to satisfy postpaid users. And this time it’s not plagiarised. The Super Value 499 plan is aimed at customers who have high local usage. The plan’s monthly rent is Rs. 499 in which the user gets a monthly free limit of 1000 local minutes to any mobile. And if these 1000 minutes still seem insufficient then the local calls to Airtel number will cost 30 paise/minute or 40 paise to any other mobile and Re. 1 to a local landline number.

Continue Reading…

Airtel today announced their way of celebrating the 61st Independence anniversary. If you scream ‘copy cat’ like we did then don’t think yourself as insane because they are offering a modified version of recently announced recharge by Tata Indicom. Airtel’s prepaid recharge will only be available in Delhi and NCR region and will be available in a denomination of Rs. 1947.

So after recharging, a user will enjoy full talktime without being charged for processing or any other taxes and also enjoy STD at Re. 1 for a month. However, the STD activation can be done via SMS which can be done by sending 1947 to 170 (toll free).