After reaching out to 70 crore hand-held devices, the ever-expanding SIM seems to have set its eyes on a life beyond mobile phones. In the next two-three months, you can insert a SIM into your laptops, tablets and other computing devices.
Aircel, which has several firsts in offering value-added services such as Pocket Internet, is in talks with laptop and tablet manufacturers to have a provision for 3G SIM. “We are in talks with the device manufacturers in order to offer this service. We hope to come out with some thing on this soon,” Mr Gurdeep Singh, Chief Operating Officer of Aircel, told Business Line .
Mr Singh, who was here to launch Aircel's 3G services in Andhra Pradesh, said computing devices now use external USB sticks to get access to the Internet. Efforts were on worldwide to bring that inside the computing device as part of hardware. “Subscribers could choose a plan and service provider to connect to the world of 3G,” he said.
A joint venture between Maxis Communications Berhad and Apollo Hospitals, Aircel, which has 3G licences for 13 circles in the country, hopes to complete the pan-India roll-out by mid-March. “Only Punjab and West Bengal are left out. We are going to complete that in the next two weeks,” he said.