Prepaid plans in India make more sense today when they are bundled with over-the-top (OTT) benefits. There are plenty of prepaid offerings from the four existing telecom operators in the country, including Reliance Jio, Vodafone Idea (Vi), Bharti Airtel, and Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL). In comparison to India, some of the international markets, such as the United States of America (USA), have very few offerings for their prepaid customers. With more options in hand, Indian consumers have the power to choose the most appropriate plan for themselves. Every telecom operator in India offers around 30 or more prepaid plans to the customers. But which prepaid plans actually make an impact on the users? Let’s talk about it.
Prepaid Plans Should Have the Following Benefits
Almost every prepaid plan is expected to have basic benefits, which include unlimited voice calling, 100 SMS/day, and a certain amount of fair-usage-policy (FUP) data. This is a plan structure that’s widely followed by the telecom companies in India.
But apart from the basic benefits, what’s the additional thing that attracts users? It is an over-the-top (OTT) benefit or multiple of them. A lot of users today look for prepaid plans with OTT benefits. It has somewhat become a trend for telecom companies to offer something extra to the users in India.
Private telecom operators including Jio, Airtel, and Vi all provide their users with an OTT benefit. Airtel has a special Airtel Thanks programme that offers multiple OTT benefits to the users. At the same time, Jio offers a free subscription to over five different applications that include JioTV, JioNews, JioCloud, JioSecurity, and JioCinema. Vodafone Idea offers users an OTT benefit of Vi Movies & TV.
All the telecom operators have jacked up the benefits of their plans and are now gearing up to increase the tariffs. This is a timely move from the operators and one which they need desperately because of the low average revenue per user (ARPU) in the industry.
