[By Veena D’Souza for Nahai]
The telecom industry in India has become a stage for farces as one service provider starts slashing tariffs, its peers start leveraging cross product USPs to communicate value propositions in a desperate effort to gain maximum number of user while maintaining their current subscriber base. Considering the fact that Indians are among the most price sensitive consumers and ones who flow with emotions, the constantly evolving tariffs by operators today, promise a lot, but fall short on deliveries.
Touching different sects of consumers, newer tariffs are being offered to maintain the subscriber base and the only benefit that telecom operators today seek, are those for themselves. The local call rate differences are evident and have been clarified by certain parts of the media for whom it is crucial that the consumers know facts as they are.
The most recent announcement by Airtel launching the reduced tariff for Roaming charges falls short on many fronts. As a consumer, one is drawn to great savings at different levels – especially in the times of inflating lifestyle expenses. But a closer evaluation of the promise brings into light the actual cost differentiators.
The newest tariff by Airtel offers Roaming charges at 60p and 80p. Although Airtel reduced the roaming tariff, it is still on a per /minute pulse. A customer who has taken Airtel’s per second tariff will continue to pay 60p for incoming roaming and 80p for outgoing roaming calls on a per minute basis, while he/she enjoys 1p & 1.2p/sec for calls made within and outside Airtel’s network.
Roaming tariffs still remain high in the country barring Reliance and Tata DoCoMo, who have taken roaming to per second frontier. Vodafone and Idea are yet to match such tariff cuts for roaming.
As a consumer who is aware, a comparison of various offering is the most obvious route to be taken. On doing so, it is clear that the tariffs offered by Reliance Mobile are extremely simple and easy to understand. Under their “Simply Reliance” plans they are offering customers 2 options – a 1p/sec tariff and a flat charge of 50p/min. Both plans offer consumers the benefits of a ‘no-frills’ charge – everything is either at 1p/sec or at 50p/min; and they have not secluded Roaming from their array of offerings. It is truly a simple plan. Tata DoCoMo’s plans also have the same theme of a flat rate of 1paise per second. But, is only suited for callers with short duration calls. Unlike Reliance, Tata DoCoMo does not offer per minute and per call tariffs to satiate the needs of those who talk for longer durations, to whom the per second tariffs of Tata DoCoMo will prove to be prohibitively expensive!
By coming in late with the Tariffs on roaming, one would have expected Airtel to come about with the best offer, since its competitors have already played their cards; but it is clearly not in their agenda to offer 1p/sec for Roaming customers. As is mentioned in their billboards – Freedom and Advantage – one may question where the two important factors vanish when it comes to roaming. After making loud announcements of the per second billing which has covered endless reams of new print and television commercials, consumers are still going to be charged on the per/min basis for Roaming and that too more than other operators in the country. One may ask why this discrimination?
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