Airtel

Airtel brings unlimited email plan for Blackberry users

March 4, 2009 By Kunal Gangar 2 Comments

Airtel and Blackberry makers, RIM have announced a new plan specifically for India. The plan dubbed as BlackBerry Personal Mail service plan offers Airtel Blackberry users unlimited email and instant messaging services for just Rs. 499.

However, before you jump with joy, let me clarify it again – its “Unlimited email and instant messaging”. In other words, you don’t have unlimited internet browsing but only IM and push email service.

Features:

We Say: Blackberry is all about push emails and I think if the user is looking for emails on the go, this is the thing to go for.

Airtel Blackberry

Airtel’s Nokia 5800 XpressMusic promotion

March 3, 2009 By Kunal Gangar Leave a Comment

Airtel is playing the handy role of a marketer to sell Nokia’s 5800 XpressMusic phone. Today, I received a mail from them saying they had a ‘great’ offer for me. However, my expectation of some monetary waiver was short-lived because the greatness in the offer was not monetary but was emphasized on services. Purchasing the phone from any Nokia Priority Dealer or The MobileStore, a user will be eligible for:

100MB free data usage for first three months

Free 1 month subscription of 4 VAS services – EZmail, Matrimonial, Portfolio Manager, News and Sports

The complimentary card to get a Rs. 400 discount on any Bluetooth accessory purchased along with the phone

We Say: Nice try Airtel but the offer ain’t that good to make me jump into the XpressMusic bandwagon. Offering some discount off the phone rather than the accessories might have made me interested.

Airtel announces SMS Dhamaka

February 6, 2009 By Kunal Gangar 1 Comment

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.

Airtel warns of fraudulent SMS (Updated)

February 3, 2009 By Kunal Gangar 1 Comment

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.

Airtel’s mChek: Crosses one million registered users

February 1, 2009 By Rohan Kamath Leave a Comment

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 [Read more…] about Airtel’s mChek: Crosses one million registered users

Results for TRAI’s Service Survey

January 17, 2009 By Rohan Kamath 5 Comments

If there is one thing that can gauge the performance of the operators’ service in the Telecom industry, it’s TRAI’s service survey. This survey is undertaken to understand operator performance on parameters like pre-sales and sales, network availability, value-added service (VAS), customer care and billing . The final score is a percentage with 90% being the cut-off set by the governing body. Here are how the results looked like: [Read more…] about Results for TRAI’s Service Survey

8.12 million GSM users added in December 08

January 13, 2009 By Rohan Kamath 3 Comments

The economic slowdown hasn’t affected the Indian telecom industry much, quite evident by the above mentioned numbers. Against 7.62 million users being added in November, December witnessed a healthy growth in these numbers – with 8.12 million users being added. This converts into a growth rate of 3.25%, which is marginally lower than the same clocked in the previous month – 3.32%. Here are the specifics of how each operator contributed to this growth:

Airtel: 2.7 million
Vodafone: 2 million
Idea: 1 million
BPL Mobile: 65 thousand
BSNL:8 lakh

At the end of December, the strength of the total user base (GSM) stands at 258 million, with Bharti Airtel leading the market with its 33.22% market share. The operator is followed by Vodafone at 23.63% share of the GSM market. The month saw all operators clocking positive growth, with the exception of BPL which saw its additions go into the red.

Airtel announces Lifetime Prepaid 99

January 12, 2009 By Kunal Gangar 1 Comment

A not so earth shattering news comes from the Airtel front about the introduction of its lifetime prepaid card at a lower price point. Now the card goes for just Rs. 99 which will also carry a talktime of Rs. 10. However, as with other lifetime prepaid cards this one also has a string attached to it. A user needs to refill his account with a minimum of Rs. 200 every 6 months. The new price is effective from today.

Airtel launches its services in Sri Lanka

January 12, 2009 By Kunal Gangar Leave a Comment

Airtel has finally launched its impending GSM services in the Sri Lankan island. The service will be offered by Airtel’s subsidiary, Bharti Airtel Lanka Pvt Ltd while the network will be managed by Huawei and IBM as a partner to manage the infrastructure.

Airtel is making its presence felt in the region. To promote the service, they are offering free SIM cards to any users from Jan 12 till Jan 25. However, the user needs to activate the card by recharging it with a Rs. 100 coupon.

7.62 million GSM subscribers added in November

December 17, 2008 By Rohan Kamath Leave a Comment

November witnessed 7.62 million new subscribers getting on to the GSM bandwagon. The addition though enormous, falls short of last months figure of 7.67 million. This has taken the GSM subscriber base from 241 million to 249 million, thus clocking a healthy 3.32% increase. Here’s how the players contributed to the final figure:

Airtel: 2.72 million
Vodafone Essar: 2.06 million
Idea Cellular: 1.2 million
Spice Communications: 68,765
BSNL: 0.67 million

From the geographic perspective, J&K, which experienced launch of services from new players saw the highest additions at 6.31% closely followed by Bihar at 5.12%. Not surprisingly, the smaller towns are adding a lot more subscribers to the revolution as compared to the metros, which are on the verge of getting exhausted.