Airtel to Announces New High Speed Broadband Plans

Airtel has announced the launch of new broadband plans, with minimum broadband speed at 2mbps in its top 10 cities and from 1mbps onwards for all other cities across the country. These 2mbps plans will be offered in Delhi, Noida, Gurgaon, Faridabad, Ghaziabad, Bangalore, Chennai, Hyderabad, Mumbai and Pune.  For all the other markets, across its service areas in the country, the new plans offer a minimum Broadband speed of 1mbps.

Airtel launches new broadband services

Speaking on the occasion Mr. Girish Mehta, Chief Marketing Officer, Telemedia Services of Bharti Airtel said that the company always took the lead in continually bringing in richer experience and higher speeds for customers. Over the past several months they have been continually adding to their broadband service portfolio. Raising the broadband speed threshold with the new broadband plans will help enhance uptake of the array of content and rich media experience on Airtel broadband.

Airtel claims that the experience comes with enhanced usage limits. The new plans offered by Airtel in their top 10 cities will be Rs. 649 and Rs. 799 for the Alfa 3GB and 6GB plans respectively. For the Max plan it is 10GB, 30GB, 75GB, 150GB plans at Rs. 999, Rs. 1,299, Rs. 1,599, and Rs. 1,999.  Rest of India -1mbps plans will be offered at 3GB, 6GB plans at Rs. 549 and Rs. 699 for the Ace plan. The Mega plan will be priced at 10GB, 30GB, and 75GB plans at Rs. 899, Rs. 1499 and Rs. 1,999 respectively. The 4mbps plans which will be available at select markets will have a Turbo plan of 10GB, 30GB, 75GB and 150GB plans at Rs. 1099, 1,399, Rs. 1,699 and Rs. 2,099.

Facebook App for iPad Coming Soon

Facebook, which released its official app for iPhone immediately after the launch of Apple's App store in 2008, has not come with an app for the tablet device -iPad, which was released in April 2010.

The No.1 social networking site has been reportedly working on a free iPad app for more than a year and is in the final stages of testing, the New York Timesreported citing sources familiar with the plans.

Currently, people have been resorting to third-party apps such as My Pad, iFace and Friendly for accessing Facebook on tablet devices, while many of the third party apps are currently operating in a risky space as the release of official Facebook app for iPad could curb traffic to their apps.

If Facebook releases its official app for iPad then iPad owners would prefer the consistent experience of an official Facebook app rather than third-party apps.

In terms of usage, Oecoway’s Friendly for iPad is the front runner among the third-party apps, which is having around 600,000 daily active users and ranked 59th in the top free iPad apps in the last month.

It is speculated that the upcoming Facebook application will address several issues from critics, who were saying that Facebook's web interface is not optimized for tablets such as iPad or any other touch screen interface.

According to those who have seen the app, it has a "slick design that has been tailored for the iPad and its touchscreen interface". Insider sources says the app enables users read and post on Facebook, participate in Facebook chats, as well as upload photos and video.

Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and CEO of Facebook, is said to have invested heavily in the project and personally supervising the development apart from fine tuning the unique and advanced features of the app. Designers of the app are also working hard to make the user experience compelling and sticky.

The company is also working on the site to improve the compatibility of the website with iPad.