Airtel Offers 1-cent-per-minute call rates from US to India

New Delhi: Bharti Airtel today launched a calling rate of 1 cent a minute on its online calling card service, CallHome, to enable NRIs in US to call friends and family back in India at the most competitive rates in the market.

Airtel hopes to popularise the service to the 3-million strong NRI population in the US.

"With our IndiaOne Offer, we are delighted to take the lead in offering the best value for US to India calling. Our tariff at 1 Cent per minute is a compelling customer proposition and is in line with Airtel's commitment to make calling to India more affordable." said Syed Safawi, executive director, mobile services, Bharti Airtel Ltd.

Airtel has also launched a host of exciting new features for the US consumers including auto recharge, free SMS from the web and audio conferencing facilities. Subscribers will be able to buy the online calling card for just $10 by logging into the website airtelcallhome.com  or through phone by calling toll free 1-877-247-5150 from the US.

After the successful US launch in December 2006, Airtel CallHome was introduced in the UK, Singapore and Canada in 2008.

Bharti Airtel Limited, a group company of Bharti Enterprises, is Asia's leading integrated telecom services provider with operations in India and Sri Lanka and an aggregate of 93.8 million customers as of end of February 2009, consisting of 91.11 million mobile customers. Bharti Airtel Limited has been voted as India's most innovative company, in a survey conducted by The Wall Street Journal.

Bharti Airtel is structured into three strategic business units - mobile services, Telemedia services and enterprise services. The mobile business offers services in India and Sri Lanka. The Telemedia business provides broadband and telephone services in 95 cities, DTH services and has recently forayed into the IPTV services. The Enterprise business provides end-to-end telecom solutions to corporate customers and national and international long distance services to carriers. All these services are provided under the Airtel brand. Airtel's high-speed optic fibre network currently spans over 90,205 kms covering all the major cities in the country.

The company has two international landing stations in Chennai that connects two submarine cable systems - i2i to Singapore and SEA-ME-WE-4 to Europe.