Mobile Services: Adoption to Rise

Thanks to the telecom regulations in India and multi-operator environment-14 operators as against around 4 operators in the other countries across the world-have led to the lowest tariffs in the world and helped India emerge as the second largest country in terms of mobile adoption.

Lowest tariff is also one of the major components which is instrumental in abrupt telecom development in India which made mobile ubiquitous. Low tariffs also brought in some of the innovations typical to India such as paisa-fication and voucher based recharging. Although APRUs were hit massively, yet it led to development and inclusion of mobile in India even at the below poverty line.

Per Second Billing

Recently, Trai released recommendations on tariff, 'Telecommunication Tariff (51st Amendment) Order, 2012'. Of all its 3 major recommendations, there is a lot of buzz around 'per second billing', as it makes it mandatory for operators to have 'per second billing' plan.

One might feel, what big deal in 'per second billing' when the plan is already in existence, some operators like Tata DOCOMO, Vodafone, airtel, etc, are offering the plan for both post-pay and pre-pay subscribers. But there is a need of making it mandatory for the telecom operators to provide at least one tariff plan based on per second billing for local and national long-distance calls.

A few large players like airtel, Reliance, and TTSL have gone for price hike by 20-50% in some of the regions in the country. This is surely a move that might change the market dynamics. Trai's move on this aims to ensure standard alongside bringing in uniformity in tariff plans in this 14-operator market.

Trai's Recommendations

In this scenario, Trai has initiated to protect the interest of consumers. 'Per second billing' is quite useful for those who make short calls. Customers will only have to pay for the calls they make. Also, Trai has no intention of curbing the interest of the operators. Therefore Trai gives liberty to the operators to offer alternative tariff plans-up to 25 tariff plans with any pulse rate, wherein they can leverage it through innovative plans or applications.

Trai's other recommendations include:

• For premium rate services, operators could charge 4 times of the local call charges for calls and SMS to vote for participants in contests and competitions in TV and radio programs.

“They should also keep it updated every time there is a change in any of the tariff plans in these formats by the 7th day of January, April, July, and October at their points of sale and retail outlets,” Trai said in a statement.