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Airtel is the largest wireless service provider in India, based on the number of customers as of June 30, 2010. It offers an integrated suite of telecom solutions to enterprise customers, in addition to providing long distance connectivity both nationally and internationally. It also offers DTH and IPTV Services. All these services are rendered under a unified brand “Airtel”.Airtel served an aggregate of 183,371,520 customers as of June 30, 2010.
ACHIEVMENTS
 Bharti Airtel Achieves Gold Certification from Cisco India. With this, Bharti Airtel is the first Indian telecom service provider to achieve this certification.
 It is known for being the first mobile phone company in the world to outsource everything except marketing and sales and finance.
 Bharti Airtel has been ranked among the six best performing technology companies in the world by Business Week.
 Bharti Airtel is the world's third largest, single-country mobile operator and fifth largest telecom operator in the world with a subscriber base of over 180 million.
 Bharti Airtel announced that it would acquire 100% stake in Telecom Seychelles taking its global presence to 19 countries.
 On May 18, 2010, 3G spectrum auction was completed and Airtel will have to pay the Indian government Rs. 12,295 crores for spectrum in 13 circles, the most amount spent by an operator in this auction.
 Airtel is the market leader in India with a total of 133,619,705 out of 444,295,711 GSM mobile connections or 31.18% market share as of July 2010.
 The Financial Times reported that Bharti was considering offering US$45 billion for a 100% stake in MTN, which would be the largest overseas acquisition ever by an Indian firm.
HISTORY OF GSM
The idea of cell-based mobile radio systems appeared at Bell Laboratories (in USA) in the early 1970s. However, mobile cellular systems were not introduced for commercial use until the 1980s. During the early 1980s, analog cellular telephone systems experienced a very rapid growth in Europe, particularly in Scandinavia and the United Kingdom, but also in France and Germany. Each country developed its own system, which was incompatible with everyone else's in equipment and operation. This was an undesirable situation, because not only was the mobile equipment limited to operate only within the boundaries of each country, which in a unified Europe were increasingly unimportant, but there was also a very limited market for each mobile equipment was limited, so economies of scale, and the subsequent savings, could not be realized.
In order to overcome these problems, the Conference of European Posts and Tele Communication (CEPT) formed, in 1982, the Groupe Spécial Mobile (GSM) in order to develop a pan-European mobile cellular radio system (the GSM acronym became later the acronym for Global System for Mobile communications). The standardized system had to meet certain criteria:
• Good subjective speech quality
• Support for international roaming
• Ability to support handheld terminals
• Support for range of new services and facilities
• Spectral efficiency
• Low mobile and base stations costs
• Compatibility with other systems such as Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN)
In 1989, the responsibility for the GSM specifications passed from the CEPT to the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI). The commercial use of GSM started around mid-1991, and by 1993 there were 36 GSM networks in 22 countries. Although standardized in Europe, GSM is not only a European standard. Over 200 GSM networks (including DCS1800 and PCS1900) are operational in 110 countries around the world. In the beginning of 1994, there were 1.3 million subscribers worldwide, which had grown to more than 5.4 million subscribers by October 1997. With North America making delayed entry into the GSM field with a derivative of GSM called PCS1900, GSM systems exist on every continent, and the acronym GSM now aptly stands for Global System for Mobile Communications
 Developed by Group Special Mobile (founded in 1982) which was an initiative of CEPT (Conference of European Post and Telecommunication)?
 Aim: To replace the incompatible analogue system.
 Presently the responsibility of GSM standardization resides with special mobile group under ETSI (European Telecommunication Standards Institute)
 Full set of specification phase -1 become available in 1990
 Under ETSI, GSM is named as “Global System for Mobile Communication”.
 Today many providers all over the world use GSM (more than 135 countries worldwide).
 More than 1300 million subscribers in world and 45 million subscribers in India
GSM – BASIS OF CURRENT MOBILE SYSTEM
 GSM today means Global System for Mobile Communication is a second generation cellular standard developed to cater voice services and data delivery using digital modulation
 Introduction by the European telephone exchange offices
 Uses the frequency ranges of 900, 1800 and 1900 MHz
 Voice (bandwidth 3.1 KHz) and data connections with up to 9.6 Kbit/s (enhancement: 14.4 Kbit/s).
 Short Message Service – SMS.
 Cell structure for a complete coverage of regions (100 – 500 m per cell in cities, up to 35 Km on country side).