Uninor offering cheapest access to social networks

Uninor is offering what it is touting as the telecom industry's cheapest access to popular social networks Facebook and WhatsApp, with Telenor's Indian arm looking to double its data users and revenue in 2014.

Aligning with the Norwegian parent's global strategy, Uninor is offering both apps at fixed prices, instead of measuring usage through megabytes and gigabytes.

For instance, an hour of unlimited Facebook app usage would cost 50 paise for a Uninor customer, while a day's usage would cost Re1. WhatsApp would cost Re1 for a day with the weekly rate at Rs5. The company, this could cut the users spend on those apps by about 50-60 per cent.

"Internet is the way in which customers consume data and our approach will be to make that usage the cheapest among all operators," Morten Karlsen Sorby, Uninor's nominated CEO, said in a statement.

Around 24 per cent of the company's about 28 million subscribers are spread across six circles of UP (West), UP (East), Bihar (including Jharkhand), Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra and Gujarat are data users.

The offer was launched by the company in Gujarat and it would soon launch in Maharashtra and Goa, the circles where the company had seen the highest internet consumption in the past year.

The company is set to at a later date launch the programme in its remaining circles.