Indian operator offers BlackBerry rival

Idea Cellular, a large mobile services company in India, has introduced a push e-mail service, called Easy Mail, for users of its GPRS (General Packet Radio Service) service.

Easy Mail is a clientless service with which any individual or enterprise subscriber can access e-mail via MMS (multimedia messaging service) on their handsets, the company said Tuesday.

Critical Path, a messaging software and services vendor in San Francisco, provided the new service’s technology.

India has been adding about 6 million mobile subscribers each month. But because of a decline in phone-call tariffs, the average revenue per user (ARPU) has been falling for service providers. Service providers are looking at services other than telephony, such as e-mail and music downloads, to boost revenue.

E-mail on mobile phones is one of a number of value-added services Idea Cellular plans to offer, in an effort to give customers more options and raise ARPU, said Pradeep Shrivastava, chief marketing officer of Idea Cellular on Tuesday.

Hutchison Essar, a mobile service provider in India, announced this month the availability of BlackBerry handsets from Research in Motion (RIM) in Waterloo, Ontario, and related push e-mail services. Another large Indian mobile services provider, Bharti Airtel of Delhi, has been offering BlackBerry handsets and push e-mail services for the last couple of years.

Idea Cellular decided to go in for a software approach to push e-mail, as it has adopted a strategy that does not depend on the type of handset a user has, Shrivastava said. Any user with a GPRS handset can use the Easy Mail service, which is the not the case with the RIM technology, he added.

With a customer base of over 12 million, Idea Cellular has operations in a number of states in India.

Idea Cellular has been offering push e-mail services to corporate customers, using technology that required its service to be integrated with the corporate e-mail system, Shrivastava said. The new Easy Mail technology does not, however, require corporate e-mail system integration, and Idea Cellular can offer push e-mail service to any GPRS user, he added.

E-mail on mobile phones is, however, still a nascent market in India, and Idea Cellular does not immediately expect large demand from its current user base. Only about one-third of its users currently have GPRS handsets, and not a lot of these users see e-mail service as a priority, Shrivastava said.