Bharti Airtel, a leading global telecommunications services provider with operations in 20 countries across Asia and Africa, today announced that it will join Bridge Alliance, a leading mobile alliance that is made up of 14 operators, serving over 500 million customers.
The 17 Airtel operations across Africa will join the alliance and gain access to the latest Bridge Alliance enterprise and roaming services. “It is important to be part of a strong alliance which can enable our enterprise customers to achieve full visibility of their regional mobile expenses for better check and control of corporate mobile spend. This gives our enterprise customers the opportunity to improve their mobile business operations at an international level” said Andre Beyers, Chief Marketing Officer at Airtel Africa. “Additionally, being part of Bridge Alliance enable the customers of Airtel Africa OpCos to enjoy forward-thinking roaming services extended to new Countries in Asia and beyond.”
“We warmly welcome Airtel Africa OpCos to Bridge Alliance. This marks a new milestone for us as we enter the growing African market,” said Alessandro Adriani, CEO of Bridge Alliance. “Customers of Airtel Africa OpCos and of all Bridge Alliance members will enjoy geographically extended, simplified and competitive data roaming and voice services. Additionally, enterprise customers will achieve full control of their global mobile expenses and seamless mobile communications solutions.”
With a presence across 17 African Countries (Burkina Faso, Chad, Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Republic of the Congo, Gabon, Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Madagascar, Niger, Nigeria, Rwanda, Seychelles, Sierra Leone, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia), Airtel is the largest telecom service provider across the continent in terms of geographical reach and had over 66 million customers at the end of quarter ended September 30, 2013. Globally, Airtel is ranked as the 4th largest mobile operator in terms of subscribers.
Bridge Alliance is a partnership of 14 leading mobile operators, namely, Airtel India, Airtel Bangladesh, AIS (Thailand), CSL (Hong Kong), CTM (Macau), Globe Telecom (Philippines), Maxis (Malaysia), MobiFone (Vietnam), SingTel Mobile (Singapore), Optus Mobile (Australia), SK Telecom (South Korea), Taiwan Mobile (Taiwan), Telkomcel (Timor-Leste) and Telkomsel (Indonesia). Bridge Alliance members leverage their long lasting partnership to develop and launch innovative enterprise and roaming solutions.
