Airtel pact with BMA to provide cross-border services in APAC

New Delhi, Apr 12 (UNI) Airtel, India's leading mobile service provider, today announced a tie-up with the eight-member Bridge Mobile Alliance (BMA) to provide seamless cross-border mobile services to its customers across the Asia Pacific (APAC) region.

''Regional services of the alliance will be available to all Airtel customers when they are on roaming in the APAC region, as well as to international roamers from member operators of the BMA,'' Airtel (Mobility) Joint President Sanjay Kapoor told reporters here.

The services include Bridge Roaming, Prepaid, Enterprise, and Bridge Conceirge.

''We will be increasing the number of Bridge Prepaid top-up counters in India from three to 50 and are also planning to extend the Bridge conceirge services in India to ten cities from the existing three,'' Mr Kapoor said.

At present there are 33 concierge counters that provide on-location assistance to customers should they lose their mobile phones, or need roaming or other technical help.

Asked about the purpose of alliance, Bridge Mobile CEO Patrick Sim said, ''Through this partnership we are able to extend our member operators' local content offerings to other members in the region more cost effectively.'' BMA will invest upto 40 million dollars over the next three years to build and establish a shared mobile infrastructure, and to deliver a wider range of regional mobile services.

The BMA is a current partnership of eight leading operators in APAC -- Airtel (India), CSL (Hong Kong), Globe Telecom (Philippines), Maxis (Malaysia), SingTel Mobile (Singapore), SingTel Optus (Australia), Taiwan Mobile (Taiwan) and Telkomsel (Indonesia).

'' We are open to working with different country operators as and when we get the opportuniy, but our focus will continue to be content and application services,'' Mr Sim said, when asked if there were any plans of extending the current partnership.

UNI RA SR DS1540