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India’s largest mobile service provider, Airtel has partnered with the blogging site Twitter to allow SMS access to Twitter messages. This is for the first time that such a service has been started by an Indian network service provider. However, it was available in the US, Canada, UK earlier.
According to Airtel sources, the new service would be exclusive for a period of four weeks. And after that, the service may be provided by other service providers in India.
It is believed that, Airtel wants to take the advantage of the Twitter brand. However, it is unclear, who is going to handle that service after that period.
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. Though such a service was started earlier by Twitter in a nominal fee, yet it was stopped later citing costs.
It is estimated that only one billion people can have internet access whereas there are more than four billion people with mobile phones. So Twitter can penetrate more due to this message service in India. Currently India has more than 457 million mobile subscribers.
