Virgin Mobile on Thursday made an official announcement for the launch of its GSM services in the country, starting with five Southern circles namely Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Chennai, Tamil Nadu and Kerala.

Virgin Mobile has conglomerated with Tata Teleservices (TTSL) to launch VAS including voice services.

The services include several innovative offerings like 'vMingle', an integrated social networking service which brings all social networking sites at one place. In addition, it enables its users to converse with friends across all social networks at one time just with a single log-in.

Another spectacular service is 'vGenie', which offers prompts and alerts like birthday reminders, wake-up calls and social networking updates to its customers along with 'vBelong' which facilitates users to design and develop their personal WAP sites for their group, college etc.

The pan-India GSM rollout is expected to be completed within this fiscal.

The company has priced its voice calls at 20 paise per minute for local and STD calls made to Virgin Mobile numbers and 40 paise per minute for local calls and 50 paise per minute for STD calls made to other networks.

In a message to the media, Sir Richard Branson, Chairman and Founder of the Virgin Group, said, "India is the only market in the world where Virgin is present in both the GSM and CDMA platforms".