Airtel plans to expand mobile network in TN

Tiruchirapalli, Jun 27 (UNI) Airtel, a leading mobile service provider in the country, has mega plans to expand its mobile network in Tamil Nadu.

Disclosing this to reporters here today, P Swaminathan, chief executive officer, Bharti Airtel Limited, Mobility, Tamil Nadu, said the cell site (towers) count would go up from 2,400 to over 4,500 before March 2007.

In terms of towns, Airtel will cover the entire urban universe of approximate 800 towns by August this year. Similarly, rural coverage, currently at 10,000 villages, would also go up to 15,000 villages.

With this network expansion, the switch handling capacity would be enhanced from two million to over three million customers before the end of next year, he added.

He said the expansion plan was aimed at ensuring that Airtel continued to be the service provider with the highest number of cell sites in Tamil Nadu.

Its pro-active management of traffic growth had ensured that its network remained congestion free.

The recently launched Tamil SMS enabled Airtel customers to send SMS messages in Tamil to their Airtel friends in Chennai and the rest of Tamil Nadu.

Once customers downloaded the application from 'Airtel live' (download free of cost) onto their handsets, they could type Tamil SMS as fast as English SMS, thanks to the unique key-entry and rendering mechanism.

The sercice also had a one touch help function, which provided a guide on how to use the standard English and numeric keyboard to type Tamil letters, he added.

UNI GSM AA SSI2105