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April 22,2010: State-run telecom operator MTNL on Thursday announced the commercial launch of the country’s first 3G driven mobile TV service in collaboration with Aksh Optifibre and Alcatel Lucent.
Mobile TV service would make multimedia and entertainment content available to MTNL mobile subscribers in the metro cities of Delhi and Mumbai.
India’s first 3G Mobile service operator Mahanagar Telephone Nigam Ltd (MTNL) today announced the launch of New Trump Vidyarthi Plan with Unlimited Free Local calls and SMS (OwnNet) , Free 3G service and lowest other network call charges for its 2G and 3G GSM mobile service (Trump) users in Delhi & NCR telecom circle.
With the new Vidyarthi plan MTNL’s Delhi prepaid mobile subscribers can enjoy Unlimited Free Local calls and SMS with in MTNL Network (Mobile/Landline/CDMA) while local calls to all other network will be charged at 50p per minute (earlier it was Rs.1).All STD calls to anywhere in India will cost 75p per minute.
India’s first 3G Mobile service operator Mahanagar Telephone Nigam Ltd (MTNL),toady announced ground braking Value Added Services for its next generation 3G mobile service subscriber of Delhi and NCR telecom circle in association with Spice Digital a leading Mobile VAS solutions provider.
This launch makes MTNL and Spice Digital the first 3G Mobile Video VAS provider in the country. MTNL introduces Video on Demand, Live Aarti and Video Conferencing whereas there are services concentrated on the urban youth like Video Fun, Video Handy Cam and Video Greeting for its 3G Jadoo Mobile service.
Even as India’s mobile telephony sector has been able to buck the slowdown, the performance of government-owned BSNL and MTNL has been deteriorating, despite having a one-year lead in the launch of 3G services.
According to DoT’s latest data, both the companies are losing market share to private operators in the mobile telephony segment. BSNL and MTNL together are down from a 17% market share at the beginning of March 2008 to 13.6% in August 2009. In contrast, the private sector’s share jumped from 83% to 86.4% during the same period.
Vodafone, the mobile service brand of Vodafone Essar, has emerged as the “Most Admired Mobile Service Brand Online” in India followed by Tata Indicom and Aircel in an pan-India survey conducted by Drizzlin Media. The survey shows that Reliance Mobile emerged as the least admired brand.
Drizzlin Media, a Branding 2.0 consultancy, audited over 1,600 relevant conversations of the 7,000 conversations sampled around India’s top 10 telecom brands to identify the most admired mobile service brand in the Indian Online Space.
Worth Rs 26,000 crore Indian mobile handset market is mainly dominated by branded phones from Finland-headquatered Nokia (more than 50%), Sony Ericsson, Samsung, LG and Motorola. Apart from these high profile handset makers, some major brands like HTC, Haier, Bleu, Spice, Videocon, Philips and some smaller brands like Simoco, Kyocera, Sagem, Micromax, Fly, Huawei, Xenitis, GeePee, Usha also peep into this market.
RIM’s Blackberry services are offered on country’s most networks like Airtel, Reliance (CDMA & GSM), Vodafone, Tata Tele(CDMA & GSM), BSNL, MTNL, Idea, Aircel. And last but not the least, Apple’s iPhone also reached India via Airtel and Vodafone.
B K Modi-promoted Spice Group and British Virgin Mobile have bid for MTNL’s franchise deals to offer 3G services in Mumbai and Delhi.
“Virgin Mobile and Spice Group have bid for our 3G franchise deal. We will finalise the bidder(s) in a month,” Mr Kuldip Singh, Director (Technical), MTNL told PTI. Spice Group, which had sold off its mobile services business to Idea Cellular, has business interests in telecom, mobile software and retail stores. Virgin Mobile, on other hand, is owned by Virgin Group of the UK.
A high-powered Group of Ministers today fixed Rs 3,500 crore as reserve price for pan-India 3G spectrum and decided to allow only five operators to offer the high-speed mobile services in the first phase.
Four new players will be given spectrum along with one existing operator – BSNL or MTNL – in their respective circles.
Article on MediaNama: The applications for MTNLs 3G Mobile Content services mandate are Open. MTNL is setting up a franchise based system, and has invited applications from potential 3G Content Aggregators to set up their Content Delivery Network Infrastructure.
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on Thursday launched the country’s first 3G technology-based mobile services of Mahanagar Telephone Nigam Limited (MTNL) in Delhi, making live TV, high speed data download and video streaming on mobile phone a reality in India.
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