India’s third largest mobile company in terms of subscribers, has tied up with Finnish cellphone major Nokia for bundling 3G handsets along with its services. Nokia India has partnered BSNL in bringing to Indian consumers 3G services on a host of Nokia devices. According to the BSNL and Nokia tie-up, the Nokia handsets including Nokia 3120Classic, Nokia 5320, Nokia N79, Nokia N81, Nokia E71 and the Nokia 5800Xpress Music, will be offered to the BSNL subscribers (opting for 3G services), bundled with BSNL 3G services. BSNL will offer various price plans for these 3G bundled Nokia devices, including talktime and data packages.
According to the sources from BSNL, the company has gained 8,000-10,000 3G subscribers since the launch of the services. But on the contrary market reports say that BSNL has not more than 2,000 customers over 24 cities. Anyhow, BSNL is presently the largest provider of 3G services in India; private companies are yet to trigger their 3G services, which allow video streaming applications such as Live TV, movie downloads, high speed data download on mobile phones.