Vodafone Idea (Vi) has brought a new prepaid plan worth Rs 549 to its offerings. The plan is now available for customers across the country. The telco added this plan in a very silent manner for the customers. What's special about this plan is the validity it comes with. This plan is purely meant for consumers who want validity and don't care about data benefits. This is not the kind of unlimited benefits plan that users are now used to subscribing to. This is a plan that will charge you at a fixed rate for every voice calling minute that you consume and has just 1GB of data. Let me walk you through this new plan from Vi quickly.
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Vodafone Idea Rs 549 Plan Benefits
The Rs 549 plan from Vodafone Idea comes with 180 days of service validity. You get a total of 1GB of data with this plan. For additional data post the 1GB limit, you will have to subscribe to data vouchers. The national as well as local calls will be charged at 2.5 paise/second. You will get a limited talktime of Rs 549.
This is a great plan for consumers who just want to keep their secondary Vi SIMs active for the long term. But one thing that doesn't sit right with me is that this plan doesn't offer SMS benefits to consumers. I sincerely would be very disappointed as a consumer if I paid more than Rs 500 for a mobile plan and don't get a single SMS benefit. It is unclear whether consumers on this plan would be able to send port-out SMSes or not. As per TRAI directive, the telcos need to enable customers to send port out an SMS to 1900 even if the consumer is subscribed to a plan that doesn't offer SMS benefits.
Vodafone Idea has silently added this plan to the Validity section of its prepaid offerings. Whether this would help the telco in reducing subscriber churn is something unclear. But one thing that is clear is that it won't help in boosting the average revenue per user (ARPU) figure much.
