Top Four Metros
1. Delhi 31,61,498
2. Mumbai 27,45,907
3.Chennai 8,92,752
4.kolkotta 8,70,274

"You buy something to sell and you sell to buy something. You destroy something to create and you create something to destroy," -Words of the famous chairman of the Sterling Group, C Sivasankaran. He was refuting a business news that his flagship company Aircel was sold for a whooping 1700 crores. But then he did not hide his intentions nor did he dismiss it out right. after all can there be specific 1700 sparks without fire?. "If I have to answer a question as to when I will die, I will only say that I will die one day, but cannot say when," a classic reply about when he will sell. he further added "As of now, I am not selling Aircel. I will continue to build up the system to the level of three million capacity. I will look into the option of selling it, if a reasonable price is offered," he said, while announcing that Aircel had crossed the one million subscriber base in Tamil Nadu on March 31 last. "I am happy that Aircel is worth Rs 1,700 crore now," the NRI businessman said. "The answer to all your questions on this subject is yes and no."

ONE million customers - a loud one page advertisement by the proud Aircel beamed in all leading newspapers on April 4th sunday. It is planning to expand its system capacity to three million cell phones by January next, by making an investment of Rs 180 crore. Mr Sivashanker also hoped that his network will reach two million capacity by november and also aims one crore plus customers in Tamilnadu. He also said very soon free connections with new features will be provided to females and children belonging to the family of the existing aircel customers. All this announcements betrays the selling news.

However rumours are alive that Idea is about to gobble Aircel and may be after a few months Airtel will gobble Idea thus ending the big fish eats small fish chain. so come July there can only be two scenerio. Aircel growing to become an all India player by acquiring new feasible and profitable licenses or elsebe gobbled. And till then Mr Siva shanker will be increasing his capacity and the price.

Aircel rates the highest in customer satisfaction and is the most fastest growing in any circle. However with licenses being available every where it is a fact that small players will loose in the long run . So either grow big or quit nicely is the rule of the day And who knows better than this but Mr Sivashanker

2. Mobile gaming is emerging as the fastest growing application in the cellular telephony industry. It has grown 50 times — in usage — in a single year. No wonder, then, that several mobile service providers are cashing on its popularity. Hutchison Max Telecom is offering 250 Java-based mobile games on its network, while Reliance Infocomm has added several gaming applications to its R World and even offers multiple players facility. Both companies have entered into an alliance with gaming companies in order to offer more to customers. Hutch has entered into a development alliance with Mauj, India Games and Mobile2Win, while about 10 companies have signed up with Reliance Inocomm through Dhirubhai Ambani Developers Prog- amme (DADP) for providing Java gaming applications on R World, the Reliance platform. There are more than 100 games on the Reliance network, according to senior executives of Reliance Infocomm. The revenue generation from the mobile gaming market can be spectacular. In east Asia, mobile gaming has generated $827 million in revenues while US wireless gaming revenues touched $436.4 million in 2001, industry sources claim. By 2006, wireless gaming is expected to be several billion dollars in annual revenue worldwide. Harit Nagpal, vice-president, corporate marketing, Hutch said: “Humans and games have had a relationship from times immemorial. Why should it be any different when it comes to mobile phones? Gaming is one of the fastest growing mobile applications today. We have seen this trend internationally, and we are witnessing it now in India.” On an average 1,20,000 mobile games are downloaded every month by Hutch users. This is a phenomenal 50 fold increase from an average of 2,200 mobile game downloads in February last year. This growth is expected to increase further with increasing penetration of GPRS handsets and applications, Nagpal pointed out.

The telecom sector may attract more outsourcing deals in the near future as Hutch and BPL are looking at offshoring options in India. “Globally, outsourcing is being accepted as a means to cut costs. In India, most operators have already begun outsourcing parts of their businesses like call centre operations, application-based services and content. Going forward, this may result in bigger deals,” Paul Cardoso, former chief executive officer and president, BPL, said. Increasing pressure to cut costs and create higher levels of efficiency would drive other operators to outsource non-core activities processes to experts. “Outsourcing does three important things for the operator. It improves the cash flow of the company, it improves efficiency in revenue generation and brings down costs. On the downside, however, if the outsourced function is not taken care of properly, then the reputation of the company is severely affected,” Sanjay Mehta, director, Ernst & Young, said.

4. Land lines and cellular phones here are being flooded with messages from Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, seeking co-operation in “taking India forward to greater heights”. The Bharatiya Janata party has embarked on a novel voice od of campaigning after the earlier SMS campaign. Scores of persons in Ahmedabad were shocked as they heard the voice of Atal Bihari Vajpayee as soon as they answered a cellphone or a land line of Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd. The message begins with “Namaskaar, main Atal Bihari Vajpayee bol raha hoon”. The voice goes on to list the achievements of the government. The PM is heard stating further that there is still a lot more to do, as poverty, unemployment and illiteracy still exist. Vajpayee goes on to state that there is a need to create an India, where people of all religions are respected, where all people feel secure. He is then heard seeking the assistance of people in creating such and India, ending his one minute and one second speech by the word `Dhanyawaad”. “I received a phone from a Reliance cellular number 011- 30820150, and saw that it was from Delhi. The moment I answered the phone, the distinct voice of Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee came across.

Network operators have been quick to spot the business opportunities this offers. If they can locate a caller for the emergency services, why not for other purposes too? Now the first businesses to exploit this information are beginning to appear and they provide a glimpse of the kinds of services we can expect in future. In the UK, the network operator Vodafone leads the pack. As the only one of the nation's five major mobile network operators to have met the EU directive's September line, its customers can already use their phones to find the nearest ATM, cinema or a plumber through WAP (wireless application protocol), the stripped-down web service designed for mobile phones. Just tell your phone that you want a flower shop or a Chinese restaurant and it searches local telephone directories to find the nearest hit. Another service allows businesses to track their employees particularly useful in the courier industry, for example. And a London-based start-up called Zingo has begun exploiting the service to put callers in touch with the nearest available taxi. Parents can even sign up to see where their children are, or at least where they left their mobile phones. Similar services are becoming available in other countries. A Stockholm-based company called It's Alive has launched a game that lets people hunt each other using their phones. And in the US, the Houston-based start-up Findtheone.com plans to offer phone owners a dating service that will alert them when potential partners who have also signed up are nearby.

This is just the beginning. Expect to see services become more accurate and widespread as the technology develops. Of course, there are teething problems. You could be forgiven for being underwhelmed with the positioning accuracy. Call Zingo, for example, and you may end up having to tell a human operator where you are if the system cannot get a fix on your phone. And what of fears about sinister surveillance? There is always going to be something slightly Orwellian about being automatically tracked. But the companies involved insist that personal privacy will not be compromised. "You don't have to register to use our service," says Ian Read of Zingo. "We are not worried about privacy issues because we don't know who you are."

2.IT 'S a modern conundrum : you 're too busy to be disturbed by incessant phone calls so you turn your cellphone off. But if you don 't remember to turn it back on when you 're less busy, you could miss some important calls. If only the phone knew when it was wise to interrupt you, you wouldn 't have to turn it off at all. Instead, itcould let calls through during spells of relative inactivity. A bunch of behaviour sensors and a clever piece of software could do just that, by analysing your behaviour to determine if it 's a good time to interrupt you. If built into a phone, the system may decide you 're too busy and ask the caller to leave a message orring back later. In a desktop computer, the system could stop instant messages or spam annoying you when you 're busy. James Fogarty and Scott Hudson at Carnegie Mellon University in Pennsylvania based their system on tiny microphones, cameras and touch sensors that reveal body language and activity. First they had to study different behaviours to find out which ones strongly predict whether you mind being interrupted. The potential "busyness" signals they focused on included whether the office doors were left open or closed, the time of day, if other people were with the person in question, how close they were to each other, and whether or not the computer was in use. The sensors monitored these and many other factors while four subjects were at work. At random intervals, the subjects rated how interruptible they were on a scale ranging from "highly interruptible" to "highly not-interruptible". Their ratings were then correlated with the various behaviours. "It is a shotgun approach : we used all the indicators we could think of and then let the statistics ferret out which were important," says Hudson. The showed that using the keyboard, and talking on a landline or to someone else in the office correlated most strongly with how interruptible the subjects judged themselves to be. Interestingly, the computer was actually better than people at predicting when someone was too busy to be interrupted. The computer got it right 82 per cent of the time, humans 77 per cent. Fogarty speculates that this might be because people doing the interrupting are inevitably biased towards delivering their message, whereas computers don 't care. The first application for Hudson and Fogarty 's system is likely to be in an instant messaging system, followed by office phones and cellphones. "There is no technological roadblock to it being deployed in a couple of years," says Hudson.

2.TRAI chairman Pradip Baijal told CNBC-TV18 that the regulator has recalculated BSNL's ADC to be about 10% of its sectoral revenues of Rs 40,000 crore (Rs Rs 400 billion). Currently, BSNL claims 30% as ADC. This will substantially bring down the amount of deficit from Rs 13,000 crore (Rs 130 billion), and in turn would lead to a reduction in call charges. Baijal says this will make the sector more viable. He explained, "It is very important for us to bring down the ADC from the unsustainable 30% to 10% because when you have 30% ADC, 92% was loaded on the fixed call. So, business moves from fixed to cellular, and instead of helping them, we make them lose business. Access deficit is basically a cross subsidy for telephony provided by BSNL in rural areas. This charge is borne by all operators who finally pass it on to the consumer.

3.Siemens Mobile and Ubiquity announced a strategic partnership for the integration of the Ubiquity SIP Application Server (Session Initiation Protocol) into IMS@vantage, Siemens' IP (Internet Protocol) Multimedia Subsystem (IMS). IMS is a platform that may be used by operators to quickly develop and deploy multimedia services for 2.5G and 3G mobile networks. With Ubiquity's application server, Siemens will be able to offer operators and open application manufacturers (OAMs) a software environment for designing multimedia and telephony services on the basis of SIP, the standard for networks of the future. Several mobile communication operators are already testing Siemens' first services based on the SIP Application Server and IMS@vantage, such as Push and Talk over Cellular (PoC), infotainment and telephone conferencing

4.Vodacom launched Africa's first location-based service using cellular networks, enabling Vodacom contract subscribers to locate any Vodacom cellphone user, provided the user consents to being located. "Being able to determine the general location of a cellphone has obvious value for family members who may require the peace of mind of knowing where their loved ones are," said Mthobi Tyamzashe, Group Executive - Corporate Affairs of Vodacom. To access Look4me, the command *120*888# is dialed in the same way as a standard telephone number. The customer then navigates a menu with options such as 'Register', 'Find cell user' and 'Who can find me?'. "South Africans live in a diverse and challenging country. Services like Look4me help put our minds at ease so we can enjoy the many positive aspects of living here," said Mr Tyamzashe.

Speaking without using vocal cords, knowing which direction a telephone call comes from, or even communicating with the five senses are some of the dreams of Japanese researchers for the mobile phones of the future.

5. Cloistered in their ultra-modern laboratories on wooded hills that plunge down to the sea an hour-and-a-half's drive south of Tokyo, some 900 engineers work on research and development for NTT DoCoMo, Japan's leading mobile phone carrier. Among them, researchers in the mobile communications, multimedia and networks laboratories spend their days dreaming up applications of the future, not just for fourth generation mobile telephony (4G), but 5G as well. "We are working on the five senses. Smell and taste will probably be the most difficult," said Toshio Miki, managing director of DoCoMo (news - web sites)'s multimedia laboratories. DoCoMo's third generation service, FOMA, the world's first, launched in October 2001, with a data transmission speed of 384 kilobits per second (kbps), makes it possible to talk by video-link or to look at an Internet site while talking on the phone. DoCoMo's next target is to achieve a speed of 100 million bps for 4G by 2010, and the researchers at Yokosuka demonstrate some of the functions they hope to introduce in the same time-frame. One of them would turn the mobile phone into a sort of tracking device to help find a friend in a crowded public place with no landmarks, something for which current phones are of limited use. It consists of recreating the sense of directional sound with the help of GPS (Global Positioning System). The other caller's voice would appear to come from the left or right, in front or behind to correspond with the actual location in relation to the listener. If the function is one day incorporated into a commercially available handset, it could make a three-way audio-conference more natural and lively and easier to follow. For example, the voice of a speaker in Hokkaido, northern Japan, would appear to come from the north for a person in Tokyo, and that of someone in southwestern Kyushu would appear to come from that direction. When using the videophone, the user would get the impression that the sound is actually coming from the mouth of the person on the screen. The concept, which is only in the first stages of research, is demonstrated by using headphones to listen to music while walking around a room. The mobile carrier is also researching the ability to recognise speech simply from the movement of facial muscles without the voicing of any sounds. The application could prove useful when discretion is required, silence must be observed, such as libraries, or conversely, where there is too much background noise. After three years, DoCoMo has succeeded in reproducing all five Japanese vowels with a voice synthesizer or on screen by applying electrodes to the cheek, between the nose and the upper lip and under the chin. The company is now working on reproducing consonants, a much larger number, which could prove more difficult. English sounds are also included in the study. With more than 45 million subscribers -- three million of them using the FOMA 3G service -- DoCoMo employs roughly 1,100 engineers in all on research and development in Japan with an annual budget of around 120 billion yen (1.15 billion dollars). It is in the unusual position as a carrier of conducting major research into mobile telephone hardware and setting the specifications for the manufacturers of handsets, says DoCoMo spokesman Nobuo Hori. "We are in very inimate relationships (with the handset manufacturers), he said. "We, at DoCoMo, are taking the initiative ... It is a different situation compared with European countries."