Vodafone Idea Limited (VIL), the third-largest telecom company in India, is at par with Airtel when it comes to tariffs. Both Airtel and Vi have the most premium mobile tariffs in the country. Vodafone Idea's CEO, Akshaya Moondra, recently commented on the base level or the entry-level tariffs that users get in India today.
The lower income group gets affected the most when there's a tariff hike and the base level tariffs go up. There was a time once, not so long ago, when users got to keep their SIM active under Rs 100. However, that price has skyrocketed to the levels of Rs 200 now with the private telcos. With every tariff hike, users fear that keeping their SIM active would beccome a super expensive affair.
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Will Entry-Level Mobile Tariffs Get More Expensive in India?
Akshaya Moondra said, "We believe that the entrylevel tariffs are at a decent level. They do not have room to increase very much because we have a large population who are just using it to having some minimum connectivity."
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Much recently, Moondra had said that mobile tariffs in India have to go up, but not in the same way it has before. Much like Airtel, Vodafone Idea (Vi) believes that tariffs should go up based on usage for the consumers. So the more the user consumes, the more he has to pay. This is more like a postpaid service thing, wherein users pay for the usage after a certain point. The exact way for how this would work is unknown, but this is the likely future for mobile tariffs in India.
But this is a decision that the industry will have to take together. One player alone can't make this happen.