Spice to spice up more circles

Goes multi-lingual with local lingo.

Cellular services provider Spice Telecom, which operates in two circles in India, is expecting to start operations in at least a dozen new telecom circles within the next couple of weeks. Spice Telecom presently operates in Punjab and Karnataka, and has a subscriber base of over 2 million.

Speaking to reporters on the sidelines of a function to launch SMS service in regional languages, Spice Telecom's CEO Navin Kaul said, the company had applied for a licence to launch its services in 20 new circles, and an official announcement was expected in a week's time.

"We are looking at all states, and probably towards the next week we will make an announcement on our decision to enter about 12-20 new circles."

He said the company was expecting to add over 2.4 million new subscribers by the end of December, next year.

Spice Telecom on Thursday also announced the test launch of its TV on mobile services in Chandigarh. Kaul said, based on the success of the test launch, the company would roll out the service in the next one and half months.

Under the TV on Mobile services, Spice Telecom is offering 12 channels including English and Hindi news channels for a monthly subscription of Rs 150. If a subscriber wants, he can even choose one or more than one channel, he said.

Meanwhile, Spice Telecom has launched 'Spice Local Lingo', a messaging service which allows users to send and receive SMSs in 12 Indian languages.

The languages that will be supported under the service include Kannada, Hindi, Oriya, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Marathi, Assamese, Gujarati, Bengali and Urdu.

The services can be downloaded on all Java-enabled mobile phones, for a one time download charge of Rs 20 per language.

Besides, the subscriber will be charged Rs 5 towards monthly subscription fee. As an inaugural offer, the SMS charges in Spice Local Lingo will cost 50 paise per message, the company said.

The Spice Local Lingo provides a language-specific soft keypad and a message edit box, where a user can compose the message and send it as a text message.

He can also send the message as a picture message for the users who do not have Spice Local Lingo.

Said Rakesh Singh, COO, Spice Karnataka, "The launch of Local Lingo is a key step to connect with the diverse Indian audience and further enhance the Spice users' experience by allowing them to communicate in their local languages."

Subscribers with a GPRS connection can download the service from Spice Portal http:ô/wap.spicetele.com or can SMS the keyword ''SLL'' to 56199 and get the URL for download.