Twitter partners with Airtel for SMS tweets

New Delhi, Oct 15: India's largest mobile service provider, Airtel has partnered with micro blogging site Twitter to allow SMS access to Twitter messages.

This will bring people in India to send tweets at standard rates and receive them for free.

"Bharti Airtel is offering people in every city, every village, every remote taluk and even the smallest panchayat the opportunity to connect to Twitter and enjoy the open exchange of information with no added fees," wrote Twitter co-founder Biz Stone in a blog post.

Our partnership with Bharti Airtel, the largest mobile operator in India, means a huge population of people can now send tweets at standard rates and receive tweets for free," Stone said.

"There are over one billion people with Internet access on the planet but there are more than four billion people with mobile phones and Twitter can work on all of them because even the simplest of these devices feature SMS," Stone added.

Bharti Airtel says that it connects more than 110 million people.

Sources said, SMS access to Twitter is expected to be a popular service in India than mobile services that require Internet access, because a very small percentage of mobile phone users in India get the Internet access.

OneIndia News