Airtel & Hutch hike chrages

Bharti Airtel and Hutch have increased local charges for calls within their own network by 20 per cent. All pre-paid and post-paid subscribers using the low-end tariff pack with rentals less than Rs 150 per month will have to pay Rs 1.20 per minute instead of one rupee a minute for Airtel-to-Airtel calls and Hutch-to-Hutch calls.

Hike in SMS rates too:

Airtel and Hutch have also increased local SMS rates to Rs 1.20 per message for all users — both pre-paid and post-paid — from Re one earlier. This comes within a few weeks of an increase in STD rates in Delhi. Both Bharti Airtel and Hutch had increased their STD rates to Rs 2.60 per minute from Rs 2.40 per minute and Rs 2 per minute, respectively.

Bharti Airtel new services

Google services for Airtel: 

Bharti Airtel Broadband and Telephone Services (B&TS) and Google have announced plans to work together in bringing important web-based services to Airtel’s community of broadband internet customers. Airtel would offer its broadband  customers a portal which includes Google Search for web-based queries, Google Gmail with 2 GB storage, spam filter, and options of web access and POP access.  Besides features like Google Talk instant messaging/ chatting service for sending instant messages to friends – anytime, anywhere in the world, Google Docs and Spreadsheets users can share and collaborate in real-time suite of advanced utility and communication applications, on-demand gaming service and music download service. Besides these offerings, customers would get the option to personalise their Internet start-page with content of individual preference – news, blog postings, weather and other interactive content and services through thousands of “gadgets” as well as content/ information from any site that gives XML feeds. Airtel Broadband customers would be able to access all these services with a single sign-on completely free of cost. Airtel plans to offer applications like e-commerce soon under this service.

Bubble(Voice based sms) service for fixed line customers:

Bharti Airtel announced on 6th August that it will  soon launch ‘Voice SMS’ over fixed line, to enable its cutomers to send Voice SMSs to any mobile, and soon expand the services  to send messages to other Airtel Fixed Line customers. To use the service, an Airtel customer has to dial ‘*’  followed by the mobile number of the customer they wish to send the Voice SMS to, it said in a statement. 
The recipient then receives an SMS alert on his mobile phone, notifying them that they have a new bubble message. The recipient then retrieves the Voice SMS by dialing ‘0’ from their mobile.  Voice SMS has also proven very popular with many groups who find SMS inconvenient, as well as those whose first language is not supported by text entry on a phone keypad. Bubble TALK, is the carrier grade intentional voice messaging  service provided by Bubble Motion. BubbleTALK was recently honored with the Best Consumer Application Award at the Mobile Messaging Awards. The BubbleTALK implementation at Vodafone Egypt was also recently named as being one of the top ten non-voice revenue-generators by the telecom analyst group Analysys.