With the prepaid pricing war heating up in the Indian market, Indian mobile users never had it so good. The best of plan options across multiple service providers offering best of network connectivity with complete transparent consumer side audit possibility, eg. open network feature being provided by the leading telecom player Airtel.
In the first of its kind, open network feature Airtel is trying to leverage the crowd power to understand the chinks in their network and improve upon them. They have opened up their networks and customers themselves can check the network coverage in their locality with existing services besides the plans for new and future towers in the area. Customers are given an option to provide feedbacks with respect to the service issues in terms of connectivity, call drops and voice quality so company can improve upon the pointed out network issues.
With so much of focus upon customer experience, the company is not leaving any stones unturned to retain their top spot. They have fought back with the new entrants by matching and sometimes bettering the best pre-paid mobile plan available in the market. Gone are the days of limitations and unlimited is the new game changer. The least priced unlimited plan is for Rs. 199 in Tamil Nadu circle which comes with a validity of 28 days, 100 SMS and 1.40 GB data per day, besides free unlimited voice calls in roaming incoming, roaming outgoing, all STD and local calls.
A similar plan is available for Rs. 249 in rest of India, the only change being increased data limit of 2 GB per day, this plan’s validity can be extended for 82 days from 28 days by paying Rs. 250 extra. Other unlimited packs are for Rs. 448 for 82 days with 1.4 GB data per day which can be extended to 90 days by paying Rs. 51 extra. (all these plans are as on Airtel website at the time of writing this article). The validity of these plans on your Airtel pre-paid number can be checked by entering the mobile number on Airtel’s recharge page. Now if we compare the least priced similar plans of the closest rivals of Airtel, Vodafone is not offering any free SMS and Jio has a plan of Rs. 299 with the maximum data limit of 3 GB per day besides similar voice and SMS facility as reported on NDTV.com.
Besides these unlimited plans, Airtel has very recently come out with a Rs. 49 plan in select circles offering 3GB of 4G data for 1 day, users in other circles get 1 GB of 4G data for 1 day, as reported in NDTV.com.
I also started with a Pre-paid number of Vodafone in year 2000, when I was in my post graduate years but got it ported to Airtel once the porting facility started in India to avail facility of a better network, and had not repented my decision. Today due to the price war between the mobile biggies, the Indian mobile telephony market, which was already the lowest in tariff across all countries, is offering incomparable benefits to the end users besides connecting the whole of India from unknownrural sleepy hamlets to the best urban centers of modern India.
