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Bharti offers free roaming, other goodies

Bharti Cellular Ltd, a fully owned subsidiary of Bharti Tele-Ventures, launched a mobile phone service in Mumbai on Wednesday, and unveiled a number of first-of-the-kind inducements to quickly grab market share.

Bharti is the fourth company to offer cellular service in Mumbai, a metropolitan area of 15 million people and the nation's financial capital.

"Today we bring to Mumbai a world-class network and a slew of unique benefits for the first time to India," said Sunil Bharti Mittal, the chairman of Bharti Enterprises, the group holding company.

Features expected to win Bharti attention include no roaming charges on calls placed through its AirTel mobile network anywhere in the country, and a 30-second billing rate.

None of India's other 12 cellular service providers offer free countrywide roaming on their networks, and all bill at one-minute increments.

Bharti will also waive airtime charges for calls logged to one international, one domestic long-distance and one local number registered by subscribers.

Incoming calls from other AirTel phones will be free, as will SMS (short message service) and voice mail for the first three months.

Many benefits will be available to pre-paid subscribers, who now account for just over half of India's 7.4 million cellular phone market.

"It's an appealing package," said Sanjeev Prasad, a telecoms analyst at Mumbai-based brokerage Kotak Securities.

"But I expect the competition to come out soon with similar offers."

Bharti, in which private equity investor E M Warburg Pincus and Singapore Telecommunications hold stakes, will compete in the Mumbai market with three existing service providers.

These are market leader Hutchison Max Telecom, in which billionaire Li Ka-shing's Hutchison Whampoa owns a major stake, state-run Mahanagar Telephone Nigam and BPL Communications.

Bharti, on Monday, began its cellular phone services in India's most industrialised state of Maharashtra, of which Mumbai is the capital.

India's $5 billion mobile phone sector is expected to be one of the fastest-growing markets globally this decade. The number of subscribers is expected to surge at a compounded annual rate of 46 per cent over the next five years.

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