In a competitive market price is very important to customers to choose a service. Similarly in Indian mobile market there is always some kind of subtle tariff war.
Recent addition of tariff war is lead by Airtel who once hiked the tariff and everyone followed them blindly. But this time incumbent players like Airtel, Vodafone and Idea (in their top circles) are entering into tariff cut in a very silent way.
This time they are pushing STV usage among its customers with some special vouchers which offer 1paisa per 2 seconds or 30paisa per minute local calling rate.
Now most of their local or Local + STD calling at 30p/min (in minute pulse or second pulse) are coming with 30 days of validity. The newer players like Uninor come up and adds a STV for its customers to call any local number at 30p/min for 90 days they are playing validity game.
This silent tariff war has another side of coin cutting down onnet call rate to 10p/min or less this strategy is more or less followed by all operators. Incumbent players have their strategy to get new customers from rock bottom tariff offering new players whose license got cancelled in February, 2012 and also to retain their existing customers.
But certainly this tariff war is not the fierce one which we saw during 2009-2010 with the launch of new operators.Next phase of tariff war will hit in the turf while new telecom policy sets in with zero roaming charge, pan India mobile number portability, reduction in call terminating charge and permission of VoIP. Pan India 4G spectrum holder Reliance Infotel may break the bottleneck of 20p/min call rate with ultra low VoIP charges.
Should tariffs fall further, now with India having the lowest call rates in the world will it be healthy for operators point of view do let us know via comments.
