With the aim to buy a $225m stake in an Indian mobile phone company, Bahrain's national telecommunications operator has joined hands with a Dubai-based private equity business.

It was informed by Batelco (Bahrain Telecommunications Co) that it would take a 49 per cent stake together with Dubai's Millennium Private Equity in S Tel, an Indian mobile operator licensed to operate in six Indian states with a total population of about 230m people.

By launching Internet Protocol Television (IPTV), Bharti Airtel has become the first private player to offer the service in the country.

The company will now offer triple play service - telephony, broadband and television over a single line to customers in the NCR and will be followed by eight leading metros. The service will also offer features such as real-time interactivity, where customers can order pizzas and book movie tickets on their TV, record programmes for seven days, rewind, forward, and Movie on Demand (MOD).

New Delhi - Bahrain Telecommunications Company Batelco has signed a deal to buy 49 per cent in Indian mobile telephone operator S-Tel for 225 million dollars, news reports said Monday.

Batelco partnered with Millennium Private Equity, a Dubai Financial Services firm, to purchase the shares in S-Tel, the Times of India daily reported.

S-tel director Santosh Robert told the newspaper the deal would enable his Chennai-based company to partner with an experienced operator for the new GSM rollout scheduled mid-2009.

BSNL landline phone service would offer a rent rebate to Pune customers whose phones had been dead or faulty for 15 days at a stretch during April 2007 to July 2008.

The Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL) has issued an interim circular to give a “rent rebate” to 22,700 customers whose telephones had gone dead for three or more days in a row. The telephones went dead due to technical faults, and occurred intermittently over a 14-month period.

Virgin Mobile topped user satisfaction in the year 2008. Out of 11 telecom operators only 5 could meet 90% quality benchmark set by TRAI.

Airtel which is considered to be the largest private operator in the sector failed to qualify for the TRAI benchmark. The other telecom operators that failed were BPL, Idea, MTNL and Spice. Vodafone and BSNL vied for the second spot with Vodafone making it to the spot by just 0.01%.

In the midst of lower sales and increasing competition in the world's fastest-growing telecom market, Motorola, which is facing lower sales now, has decided to shut down its distribution division in India. It has been learnt that now the distribution work will be done out of Singapore.

As of now150 people have already been informed regarding the loss of their jobs, though it is not known how many people worked in the division and will have to quit.