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Idea Cellular is to shift its 1.5 million pre-paid users to per- second billing (PSB) plan, which is more affordable than existing plans, over the next 30 days.
The Aditya Birla Group company is planning to shift its 1.5 million users who are currently on per- minute billing (PMB) plan. The company has a total customer base of over 166 million, with nearly 157 million pre-paid users.
“We have been providing both PMB and PSB plans to users, so far. Henceforth, we will offer PSB plan by default to our entire base of nearly 157 million existing and new pre-paid users,” said Sashi Shankar, Chief Marketing Officer at Idea Cellular,” Idea Cellular Chief Marketing Officer Sashi Shankar said.
Earlier on Monday, Bharti Airtel, India’s largest telecom operator by subscribers, moved all its pre-paid mobile customers in the country to per-second billing plans.
The New Delhi-based company rolled out a new ‘Pay For What You Use’ scheme to ensure that customers pay only for the time they use the Airtel network.
Call drops issue According to industry experts, telecom companies were looking to move users to PSB plans to tide over the call drop issues. On a PSB plan, billing is done only for the exact amount of time utilised and call drops do not count, unlike in a PMB plan.
However, Tata Teleservices was the first to launch per-second billing in the country.
“Pay per second is much more than just about call drops. It is about charging the customer only for what they use and that was the underlying spirit with which we had brought in this disruption in the Indian market when we had launched in 2009,” said Gurinder Singh Sandhu, Head–Marketing (Mobility) at Tata Teleservices.
“As always, we welcome our followers into this world of fairness,” he added.
According to Arvind Bali, Director & CEO, at Videocon Telecommunications, “Our base tariffs are on per-second pulse. Further, us being a new operator, there is absolutely no congestion in our network and hence no problem call drops whatsoever.”
“Having said that, we continuously keep augmenting our network to ensure service quality. Also, in case of call drops, if any, we do give some freebies to the customer,” he added.
A Vodafone India spokesperson said the GSM operator’s about 90 per cent of 173 million pre-paid users are already on PSB plans. The company had a total of 185 million users in the country.
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