Trai for USO Fund revamp

Around 30% of Bharti Airtel's wireless subscriber base resides in the rural parts of the country, according to official data. For Vodafone, BSNL, Reliance Communications and Idea Cellular, the rural user base is around 31%, 34%, 19% and 30% of their respective wireless pie.

Out of an all-India mobile subscriber base of 347 million as of 2008-end, the rural India contributed around 92 million, or 26%.

Idea Cellular, one of the leading CDMA cum GSM Services provider, today rolled out its Blackberry service in collaboration with Research In Motion (RIM).

The company revealed that it will now offer a wide range of BlackBerry smartphones and services for enterprise and individual customers on its network, nationally.

The BlackBerry solution provides customers with easy wireless access to e-mail, phone, calendar, Web and multimedia applications, as well as access to thousands of other mobile business and lifestyle applications.

Hanover, Germany  - Skype, the popular phone-like service that lets people talk free over the web, plans a set of new services which it will charge for, chief operating officer Scott Durchslag said Wednesday at the CeBIT trade show in Germany.

In an interview with Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa, he said these would include paying 20 cents to dictate a text message into Skype's servers and have it delivered by short-message service (SMS) to mobile phones.

Paris - French telecommunications giant France Telecom said on Wednesday that its profits for the year 2008 fell by 35.4 per cent over 2007, to 4.07 billion euros (5.1 billion dollars).

The reasons for the downturn was a decline of 527 million euros in operating income, an increase of 337 million euros in expenses due to one-time items and a jump of 1.5 billion euros in corporate taxes, the company said in a press statement.

Company bags Rs67crore BSNL contract

The state-owned telecom company, Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd (BSNL) will now also start WiMax service in rural area of Gujarat. The Chennai-based IT firm, Gemini Communication has won an order from BSNL to provide the service in rural area of the state.

Gemini Communication, which is listed on Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE), announced on Tuesday that it has bagged an order worth Rs67 crore from BSNL for its rural mobile WiMax project.

To provide better quality of services (QoS) standards in India, telecom regulator TRAI has asked for measures to make sure that there is a limit put to set total number of subscribers under a single bandwidth unit.

In a declaration, the regulator said, “There have been complaints from the subscribers regarding inadequate broadband speed being provided by the Internet Service Providers. Most of the complaints allege that the available broadband speed is lower than the subscribed speed.”