Bharti Group's cellular brand Airtel on Wednesday launched free multimedia messaging services for its subscribers. It also unveiled pan-India GPRS (General Packet Radio Services) for its corporate customers.

Moreover, Airtel users can now avail of full roaming facility on its pre-paid card at no extra activation fee. Until now pre-paid card users could only get roaming on incoming calls and had to pay Rs 50 as activation fee.

Airtel customers will have to pay no charge for sending an MMS till April end. The scheme will allow Airtel's 2.8 million subscribers to send an receive free messages in the form of voice, picture or video.

For GPRS services, Airtel is focusing only on corporate customers. This will allow subscribers to access e-mail and surf the Internet on laptops using their GPRS mobile phone. The package comes at Rs 600 a month.

However, Bharti does not have a GPRS package for the entry-level retail subscribers unlike Hutch and BPL, which have introduced basic GPRS services at Rs 99 and Rs 200 a month respectively.

The unveiling of these new services, by Airtel's brand ambassador and Bollywood actress Kareena Kapoor, is in response to the launching of similar services by its competitors Hutch, BPL and Idea in the past few months.

To cash in on the cricket fever, Airtel also launched the Harsha Mobile -- live updates on World Cup matches by cricket analyst Harsha Bhogle.

Anil Nayar, president (mobility), Bharti Televentures said,  "The simultaneous roll out of a nationwide GPRS network with a fun-filled cricket portal, full roaming on pre-paid takes forward our promise of delivering finest value to our customers."