Tones – Types and consumption Monday, Jun 29 2009

Invention of Mobile Value Added Services (Mobile VAS ) has been the biggest boon to Mobile /telecommunication service providers today. Millions of Indians are subscribing to VAS mainly because they think its either cool or enjoyable to use!. Specially, tones is very popular among may mobile users. There are many types of tones offered by service providers. Some of them are: 

1. CRBT – Calling party listens to music instead of the regular tring-tring tone
2. Ring tones - Called party sets a musical ring tone for the incoming calls when it rings
3. Busy caller tune - Tone set by mobile user when busy and cannot receive calls
4. Video tones -  Subscriber gets a video display along with music when some calls (similar to ring tone but with video)
5. Missed Called alerts – message received  by called party when he/she miss receiving the call
6. Voice SMS – Recorded message (own voice) sent by caller to the called party
    

Here is a report which talks about popularity of tones in urban India (March/April 2009 mobile users) . Finding out “who called” and informing people when busy” are the two other most popular Value added services!

Tones - consumption in urban India

Missed call alerts is used by almost 110 million urban Indians while Talk/Voice SMS is used by almost 80 million.

How often do you use these tones?

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Caller Ring back Tone: Set a pleasant tune for your caller Friday, Jun 5 2009

A special feature through which the calling party can hear a song or music instead of the default “tring tring” tone. It is a subscription based service, in which the subscriber is the called party.  Service can be activated or deactivated whenever the subscriber wishes to do so. Various service discovery channels are available to download and activate the ringback tone of subscriber’s choice

• IVRS – Subscriber listens to voice based menu and can select the required ringback tone
• WAP – One can browse through the WAP portals and download the ring back tone
• Web – One can browse  through the online portal and download the ring back tone
• SMS -  Type a short message with preserved keyword for the ring back tone and send to the pre-defined shortcode
• USSD – Select from the text based menu by dialing the predefined service code

CRBT is available in various categories such as instrumental, bollywood, holly wood, devotional, mimicry, regional songs, bhajans, funny clips, movie clips, based on occasions etc. Subscriber can set different ring back tones to different callers if they wish to do so, or just set one tune for all the callers. Other features available in addition to setting the ring back tone are personalize, copy, gift, shuffle, album(group of tunes).

Today CRBT is become very poplular among the mobile users making it the second most consumed  VAS content by mobile users after SMS services. It is mainly because it is enjoyable, handset independent and above all affordable. This Mobile VAS service is provided by all the Indian operators in all part of India. It is more commonly known as hello tunes (Airtel), Dialer tunes (Aircel), my tunes (Spice telecom), callertune( Vodafone, Reliance) , Play tunes (MTNL) etc in India.

What do you think about this service? And what is your experience with  caller ring back tone.

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