Bharti Airtel said starting Monday, it will move all its prepaid customers nationally to the “more affordable” per second bill plan.
Advertisement
Analysts said most rivals were likely to follow in Airtel’s footsteps as the telecom business was highly oligopolistic, with each company watching the other’s moves and trying to match it.
Indian mobile operators are responding to pressure from the government to address the issue of frequent call drops.
While the large majority of the operator’s prepaid customers are already on per-second plans, the company will now move to ensure its entire customer base is. For example, in case of a per minute billing pulse, if a call gets dropped after 3 minutes 15 seconds, the customer will be charged for a total of 4 minutes (45 seconds extra) even though he did not talk for that duration. Customers will still be able to opt for discount packages at per-second or per-minute rates.
Gopal Vittal, Airtel’s CEO, recently explained that since approximately 95% of the network provider’s clients were on a second-based tariff plan, there was no possibility of the company earning revenue through call drops. The transfer has been rolled out beneath the corporate’s new “pay for what you employ” initiative.
While the company has been driving focused efforts to enhance customer experiences and its service delivery with initiatives such as rapid network expansion for 2G, 3G and 4G services, direct customer engagements for site locations, EMF education programs, constant network quality upgrade and monitoring etc., the “Pay For What You Use” initiative is yet another step in this direction.
Advertisement
The draft proposes that users of encrypted messaging service on demand should reproduce same text, transacted during a communication, in plain format before law enforcement agencies and failing which the government can take legal action as per the laws of the country.
