Airtel ranked Best Telecom Company in Gujarat at GESIA Awards

Bharti Airtel one of the Asia’s leading integrated telecom service provider was recognised as the Best telecom company in Gujarat at the 3rd edition of GESIA Annual awards, given away in Ahmedabad recently. Airtel was chosen for this award from among the leading telecom companies that currently operate in the state of Gujarat. Airtel is the only service provider in Gujarat to offer Mobile, Broadband, DTH services and VSAT based solutions to their customers in Gujarat and some of the major competitive differentiators that contributed to Airtel’s recognition as the best Telecom Company award are:
· The company has built up an extensive cellular network for providing world-class mobile service to the people of Gujarat, by putting up more than 5600 towers, by serving all census towns and more than 12100 villages and 248 towns.
· Airtel covers about 94% of Gujarat’s population with a customer base of 5.27mn in Gujarat.
· The Airtel e-Gram connectivity infrastructure project is the largest e-governance rural connectivity initiative at the village level. Under this project, Airtel partnered with the Government of Gujarat and set up telecom infrastructure which provides a comprehensive VSAT based solution, connecting panchayats and Common Service Centers (CSCs) across 13716 villages in the state.
· Airtel has a cumulative investment of Rs 2,490 crores in Gujarat as of January 2009.
· Airtel Telemedia provides all types of internet service, broadband service, fixed land line service, lease line service, bandwidth services and ISDN services at Ahmedabad and Surat. The total customer base at Ahmadabad and Surat is around 50 K with a turnover of 370 Mn. The company has employed around 80 employees to handle its telemedia affairs in Gujarat.
· The company offers Direct to Home (DTH) services covering all the districts and cities in the State. The company provides employments to 138 employees including indirect employees. In Gujarat, the company provides its DTH services to around 1.5 Lakh customers as on December, 2009.

Commenting on this achievement, Shivan Bhargava, COO, Bharti Airtel – Gujarat Circle said, “Airtel is dedicated to continually improving the service experience for our customers and receiving this award is a testament to our commitment and efforts. Our extensive services portfolio enables us to offer innovative and best-in-class propositions for our customers. We have a special focus on the youth and the rural segment and will continue to find newer ways to engage successfully with them.”

3G services on mobile in India

as we know that Indian government has allocated 3G spectrum to many  service providers such as reliance communication, spice cellular, Tata Teleservices, Airtel, vodafone-essar, idea cellular and some others after the bids for 3G spectrum got over. There are some reports that the 3G services in India will start by January 2011.

The 3G services are not going to be cheap in India. It will cost almost 700 to 8900 rupees per month to the customers who want to enjoy the 3G services on their headsets. Airtel Chief has already said that 3G services are not going to be cheap in our country.
Rahul Gandhi launched 3G services in Amethi in his latest tour to this constituency. Congress General Secretary Rahul Gandhi visited Amethi only for the launch of 3G services. There at the time of the launch of the 3G services in Amethi he said that telecommunication plays a bigger and very important role in the development on the country.
Networking giant Huawei and Tata Teleservices Limited have signed a deal to establish 3G network in India. There will be deployment of 3G services in 9 circles in India by networking giant Huawei with the help of Tata DoCoMo. Tata DoCoMo has said that it will try its level best to provide the best 3G services to the customers.

3G technology is very new in India. Therefore there is a lot of confusion among the customers related to the 3G services in India. There are the speculations that by 2015 there will be almost 107 million customers of the 3G services in India. But one thing is for sure that 3G services in India could be only for the rich people as ordinary people can’t afford to spend 700 to 800 rupees per month only for mobile.
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Online Mobile Recharge Numbers – Vodafone customers spend the most!

The Indian telecom industry has been witness to all 3 S’s – the Successful growth story, the Slump in tariff rates and now even the Spectrum scam that has not only rocked the nation and but also entangled Prime Minister Manmohan Singh with it.
Despite above all, the matter of the fact still remains that telecom sector is growing by leaps and bounds. This can be gauged from the growth in the number of mobile subscribers that has reached 706.37 million by the end of August 2010 and the overall tele-density in India has now reached almost 60%.
Going deeper into the wireless segment, interesting information coming out is that the post-paid (or billing) section hardly constitutes less than 1/5^th of the overall mobile subscribers. Thus, a majority of the market is driven by pre-paid connections.

However, currently only around 1% of all mobile recharges of the pre-paid connections happen online but this share is growing rapidly with increasing internet connectivity and the masses finding it convenient to make utility transactions from the comfort of their homes.

This rapidly changing consumer preference towards online prepaid mobile recharges can be further gauged from the fact that a newly launched start-up firm catering to online prepaid mobile recharges – Freecharge.in – which we had covered just few months back, is already logging over 3000 transactions on an average daily basis.
Freecharge has come out with a report (on data covering 10 telecom operators) analysing the average spending pattern of mobile talk-time by users of various telecom circles and the popular mode of payments of ecommerce based on 1 lakh transactions made on their site over Sept-October 2010.
The payment methods available for the users were Credit Cards (Master and Visa only), Debit Cards (7 Indian banks and all Visa Electron Cards) and Net Banking (36 Indian Banks).

Highlights of the User Spending Pattern on Mobile Recharges

1. Vodafone users spend highest on prepaid talk-times at around 15%, more than the overall average of Rs.128.
2. Aircel customers spent the least at around 21%, lower than over all average.
3. Karnataka is the highest spending circle – around 16% more than the average.
4. Avg. ticket size on credit card transactions is 34% higher than Net Banking transactions and 83% higher than Debit Card transactions.
5. SBI customers prefer using debit cards for online transactions whereas ICICI customers use their net banking account.

1. Overall Operator-wise Ticket size comparison

The average recharge amount has seen a big variation with Vodafone users’ spending almost 50% more than Aircel users. Vodafone was closely followed by the state-owned BSNL and Idea Cellular. The overall average ticket size was Rs.128/-.

2. Operator & circle-wise ticket size comparison

Vodafone subscribers were highest spenders across all 3 major circles followed by Tatas in Karnataka and Mumbai. The surprising entry, of all, is that of Idea Cellular which has just been a recent entrant in the overtly competitive Mumbai circle and seems to be gradually firming up its feet.

3. Circle-wise ticket size comparison

Though Delhi is one of the top telecom circles of the country, Delhi subscribers are spending about 8% less than their counterparts in Karnataka on online mobile recharges. In fact, Karnataka tops the list beating Mumbai by a pretty small margin.

1. Payment Method Volume Share

Debit cards were the most preferred payment method for the transactions made. A notable reason for this being the target group focuses of the site, which were students and freshly employed people, who use their ATM cum Debit cards online for a transaction. Clearly the Debit card users are low spending users with an average ticket size of Rs.96.3/-. The average ticket size for transaction made through credit card is almost 83% higher than Debit card users.

5. Payment method & its bank share

On comparing the various banks for the payments, the average ticket size did not fluctuate noticeably within the same payment type. Though, there were clear leaders in each payment type. Amongst credit card transactions Visa was a leader with almost 2/3^rd transactions being paid through a Visa card.
Can we expect Online Mobile Recharge business to grow at breakneck pace in India?