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Tag: Andhra Pradesh

  • Airtel crosses 3 mn mobile subscribers in Karnataka

    Airtel crosses 3 mn mobile subscribers in Karnataka

    BANGALORE: Bharati Airtel has announced that their total mobile subscriber base has crossed three million in Karnataka. With this they claim to be the circle with the largest portion in the Airtel all India subscriber pie of 25.89 million (to end July 2006).

    Airtel joint president-mobility Sanjay Kapoor said, “This equals Singapore’s subscriber base.” Karnataka has been the growth engine for Airtel disclosed Kapoor.

    Bangalore has a subscriber base of roughly 50 per cent of Airtel’s Karnataka mobile subscribers according to Airtel Karnataka CEO Deepak Mehrotra.

    Airtel continues to be Karnataka’s no. 1 mobile network in telephony, even beating BSNL mobile services. The only other entity that could match Airtel coverage in numbers and reach is the BSNL landline. Airtel now covers over 12,000 towns and villages in Karnataka, of which more than 11,000 towns and locations have a population of less than 5000. This includes 96 per cent of the gram panchayat area in the state, and covers 63 per cent of the population. Around 500,000 subscribers have been added over the last three months, a million over the last six, informs an official release.

    Airtel plans to expand the gram panchayat reach to 100 per cent by March 2007. Mehrotra revealed that Airtel has spent around Rs.14.35 billion capitalization to date in the state and another Rs.3.5 billion have been earmarked till end March 2007.

    Karnataka and the Andhra Pradesh circle which stands third after Delhi both contribute to more than 20 per cent of the all India subscribers in the Airtel kitty. While Punjab stands fourth with a subscriber base of around 2.4 million, adds Airtel Karnataka COO V Venkatesh.

    Airtel executive director -southern regional hub, mobility Atul Bindal revealed that the southern hub comprising of five circles has had the fastest growth in the number of subscribers in the country.

  • Isro renews MOU with Andhra Pradesh on Sat-Com applications

    Isro renews MOU with Andhra Pradesh on Sat-Com applications

    BANGALORE: Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro) and the Government of Andhra Pradesh have renewed their July-2000 Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) on the application of satellite based communication. A Bhaskaranarayana, director, Satellite Communication Programme of Isro and T V Parthasarathi, director, IT and Communication Department, Government of Andhra Pradesh, signed the renewal of MOU in Hyderabad.

    Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh, Dr Y S Rajashekara Reddy and chairman, Isro Dr G Madhavan Nair were present during the signing ceremony.

    Under the renewed MOU, which also includes new applications, Andhra Pradesh will use Insat capacity for satellite based communication in the areas of distance education, telemedicine, agricultural extension, self-help groups, etc. While Isro provides the transponder capacity on board its Insat and the technical support, Andhra Pradesh Government operates the satellite communication network for these applications, states an official release.

    Soon after the signing of the original MOU in July 2000, experimental transmissions had started in November 2000 from Isro’s Master Control Facility at Hassan and subsequently, in April 2002, a satellite Hub station was established at Dr B R Ambedkar Open University, Hyderabad. Following this, a satellite based “Andhra Pradesh Net” was set up in March 2003. At present, a full-fledged Mana-TV is operational with a state-of-the-art studio. Mana-TV has over 2,000 terminals and has 5 television channels and one data channel catering to the requirements of educational institutions like schools and colleges (including engineering colleges). It is used for both formal and non-formal educational training.

    Mana TV is now being upgraded to include more interactive terminals as part of Edusat. In the recent years, under the Edusat programme, an exclusive network has been established connecting top fifty technical institutions/engineering colleges in India under Indo-US cooperation for transmitting lectures by invited US experts delivered from Amrita Viswa Vidyapeetam, Coimbatore. Four of these colleges are located in Andhra Pradesh, the release adds.

    In the field of telemedicine, the first pilot project was started in Andhra Pradesh in 2000 connecting Apollo Hospitals at Chennai and Aragonda village and Isro’s hospital at Satish Dhawan Space Centre, SHAR, Sriharikota, in Nellore District. The telemedicine network will now be extended to eight more hospitals.

    Andhra Pradesh is also one of the foremost in the utilisation of remote sensing technology for management of land and water resources and disaster management. For example, remote sensing technology is used for watershed management in drought prone districts of Adilabad, Ananthapur, Kurnool, Mahaboobnagar, Nizamabad and Ranga Reddy. Management plans for major irrigation projects like Srirama Sagara and Nagarjuna Sagara have been planned using remote sensing data. More than 35,000 bore wells have been drilled using remote sensing data with better than 90 percent success rate.

    As part of M S Swaminathan Research Foundation Network, a Village Resource Centre (VRC) has been set up at Adakkal, Moosapet with an Expert Centre located at International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT). Another 16 locations have been identified for setting up of VRCs to connect the Expert Centre through Byraju Foundation.

    Thus, Andhra Pradesh has been extensively using Isro satellites for societal applications and today’s renewal of MOU reiterates its commitment to extend these applications with Isro’s help.

  • Bharti Airtel inks $ 1 billion network expansion contract with Ericsson

    Bharti Airtel inks $ 1 billion network expansion contract with Ericsson

    MUMBAI: Bharti Airtel today announced the signing of an estimated $ 1 billion network expansion contract with Swedish telecommunications equipment manufacturer Ericsson.

    The contract will enable Bharti Airtel to rapidly expand its mobile services footprint further and reach out to all towns and cities in 15 telecom circles in the country. The three-year service contract with Ericsson is towards the design, planning, supply and installation commissioning of Airtel networks in these circles.

    Ericsson will also upgrade the network with mobile softswitch (Media Gateway and MSC Servers), the solution that paves the way to an all-IP network. Bharti Airtel will be able to reduce the operational costs and introduce new services in a cost-efficient way.

    The scope of the agreement extends to 15 Airtel circles of Delhi, Haryana, Punjab, Himachal Pradesh, UP (West), Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Chennai, Karnataka, Kerala, Rajasthan, UP (East), Jammu & Kashmir, Assam and North East.

    Manoj Kohli, president, Bharti Airtel said, “At Bharti, it has been our endeavor to find innovative business models to deliver better customer experience. Our partnership with Ericsson is testament to this belief as it allows us to focus on delivering better customer experience even as we leverage the world class expertise of our partners to roll out our networks across all census towns by March 2007. In addition, we are also sourcing next generation products that will allow us to deliver innovative products & services to our customers.”

    This partnership will enable Airtel to channel its resources and expertise to its core areas of product innovation, value added services, marketing, branding & pricing, while simultaneously providing world class mobile services by leveraging Ericsson’s world class expertise in network management.

    “Our partnership with Bharti Airtel resulted in the first managed services contract in the industry. Speed of roll-outs plays an extremely important role in large expansions of this nature. Ericsson has demonstrated expertise in this area. We are honoured and pleased that Bharti Airtel has chosen to partner with us to expand their footprint across India” said Mats Granryd, managing director, Ericsson India.

  • Print coverage influences TV viewership of sports

    Print coverage influences TV viewership of sports

    MUMBAI: This afternoon the National Sports Seminar was held by the The Sports Journalist Federation of India.

    The speakers included Fed Cup coach Enrico Piperno, BCCI executive secretary Ratnakar Shetty, Ogilvy & Mather chairman Piyush Pandey and Tam Media CEO L V Krishnan.

    Krishnan looked at how coverage of sports in the newspapers influences television viewership. “Sania Mirza needs to thank two people – her coach and journalists. The coverage on her has been fantastic. When she played Serena Williams at the Australian Open recently it made front page news. Ratings soared in Andhra Pradesh and Hyderabad.

    “Newspapers educate sports fans on a topic. They are then motivated to go to the television to watch the happenings. A recent event that benefitted in a big way from newspaper coverage was the football World Cup. In 2002 when the event was on the Indian cricket team was playing England at the same time. Cricket won comfortably then.

    “This time there was a 300 per cent jump in the viewership of the soccer World Cup. That is because of the huge newspaper coverage. There was 450,000 cms worth of print coverage which was more than what was seen during the 2003 cricket World Cup. For the common man, media is a seamless medium. They read about a sports event in the newspaper and then they gravitate towards the television.

    “At the same time you need a personality that captures the public’s imagination. Hockey has suffered in this respect. There is no one dominant personality who can give the sport a push as far as visibility is concerned. Soccer on the other hand is filled with famous names. Their pictures in the newspapers create a lot of recognition even in the smaller towns.”

    He also spoke about the effectiveness on advertising in sport. After all it is the one genre where in product placement blends in seamlessly. An example was Pepsi getting involved with a cricket series a couple of years ago. They branded the boundary rope with triangles. It worked well because the camera focus on the boundary rope was high. Replays also helped visibility. “By comparison if a character in a soap is shown drinking a Cola it looks out of place and disrupts the flow of the story.”

    Pandey noted that in India there are two great advertising vehicles Bollywod and sports (mostly cricket). the advantage that a sportsperson has is that he/she is a great body of character. “There is performance which kids aspire for and parents appreciate. There is the power of youth and also physical activity. Unfortunately in India, there is laziness both on the part of the agency and on the part of the sportsperson.

    “They do not sit together. If they did, then the scriptwriter would get a clear idea of what it is the sportsperson can and cannot do. Because there is lack of dialogue you get ads that ridicule a sports person. The Sehwag Ki Ma ads made a great batsman look like a fool. I can also think of just two ads where Sachin Tendulkar’s appeal was used well. One was the Pepsi mask ad. here the fact that he likes kids came through. Also Pepsi wisely did not let him speak,” said Pandey.

    He noted that a lot of great ads use sportspeople in a natural environment. An example is Sampras and Aggasi playing tennis for a Nike ad. At least the company is not using Sampras to sell diapers. It is upto the sportsdperson to also be selective of the kind of creative he/she appears in. Otherwise his/her brand value can go down.

    Shetty spoke about the different ways the BCCI is using money. One way is increasing the pay for domestic cricketers. This enables someone to look at cricket as a career even if he is not in the national side. The BCCI also gives pensions to retired cricketers. It is also looking to give women’s cricket a push.

    Then there is the stadium upgrade project. He admitted that the Wankhede stadium in Mumbai needs a facelift if it is to host matches during the 2011 matches. The BCCI will reimburse the various cricket associations upto Rs. 250 million on their renovating or building stadiums. The BCCI is also looking to create a corpus fund to help other sports. He added that the BCCI is going to inaugurate its head office at the Wankhede stadium in October. It is also looking to build a musuem where visitors can look at artifacts.