admin Posted on 3:30 pm

Mobile tariff war in India

India is a very vast country with a population of around Rs 110 crore, it is supposed to overtake China in population within 10 to 15 years from now. So there is a very, very large market here for telecom operators. Operators from around the world are in a race to invest in the Indian telecom market.

India has mobile operators for GSM and CDMA, GSM players are Airtel, BSNL/MTNL, Vodafone, Reliance, Idea, Tata Docomo, Aircel, Uninor. CDMA carriers include Tata Indicom, Reliance, Virgin Mobile, MTS. Most of the market share is held by operators such as Airtel, BSNL/MTNL and Reliance.

With the recent increase in operators, the rate war between them to stay in the market has also increased, becoming more intense every day. Initially, the SIM card in India was selling for around $2 or Rs.99 but now it has gone down to $0.5 or Rs.25 even less. SIM cards are sold on the road like vegetables. There were deals like 3 SIM cards from different operators that were sold for just $2 or Rs.99, such is the situation in India now.

Tata Docomo took a revolutionary step by introducing a new per-second billing system where the user will be charged per second instead of per minute, so if he talks for around 30 seconds, he will be charged a call fee. 30 times per second. With this, all other carriers were also forced to start the same per-second billing system. Call rates introduced by Docomo were 1 paise/second.

MTS, which is the new entry in the Indian mobile market, is a CDMA player, it introduced a plan of 0.5 paise/second. Also other operators offer offers like 10,000 free seconds per month or 5,00,000 free seconds per month with a small recharge amount. Well, if not, it is difficult for them to stay in India, because people here like change, so they will easily accept an offer that is cheaper than the one they have.

If this continues like this, a situation could come where the operators could give electrical appliances like mixer, grinder, etc. free with a SIM card to attract customers to them. Ultimately, it is the user who will benefit from this tariff war and, to a certain extent, the operators as well.

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