AirTel's USSD Service Allows Facebook Access On Any Mobile Without GPRS

AirTel - India's leading Mobile Service Provider today announced that they are the first ones in the world to offer Facebook access over USSD service to all AirTel subscribers. Which means you can now access all your FB status updates on your jurassic mobile without needing a data service. The service has been rolled out immediately to over 150 million AirTel subscribers in India, making world's favorite social network just a button press away. Singapore based U2opia which develops innovative software applications will provide the technology called 'Fonetwish' to AirTel. AirTel users can avail the service for Rs. 1/day without needing any special data plan. All they have to do is press *325# (and “*fbk#” for non-qwerty mobile handsets) to access Facebook.

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USSD is the short form of Unstructured Supplementary Service Data - a protocol used by the GSM service providers. Through USSD, GSM phones can communicate to and fro with the service provider's network of computers. This allows any GSM phone to access WAP services, callback services, mobile e-commerce services, location aware content services and menu based information services. The USSD messages comprise of 182 alphanumeric characters. During USSD session, the messages create a constant, real-time connection with the servers and the connection remains open all the time. This allows for two way sequencing of data between the servers and the accessing GSM phone. This is the reason, USSD messages are faster than standard GSM based text-messages.

AirTel customers can update their FB status free of charge but to access other features offered by Facebook, users will have to pay Rs. 1 per day. Good news for AirTel users in India. Say what?

Via: #-Link-Snipped-#| <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unstructured_Supplementary_Service_Data" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Unstructured Supplementary Service Data</a>