Vodafone Idea (Vi) is allowing users to send SMS if they are on a talktime pack. Note that the same hasn’t been confirmed by the company but by a TelecomTalk community member, verified by me. Vi offers quite expensive SMS prepaid packs compared to what Jio and Airtel are offering to their users. However, this had limited the ability of low-income users to send SMS for porting out of Vi’s network. Looking at the situation, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) had issued an order for the operators to allow users to send port out SMSes even if they are not on a prepaid pack with SMS benefits.
However, Vi users on a talktime pack can send SMS for the bank’s OTP verification now. The user had recharged with a Rs 10 prepaid pack of Vi and was able to send an SMS for verification to the bank in the Google Pay app. Whether the other telcos allow this or not right now is unknown. But this is a great thing for Vi users.
Vi Users Can Also Send Normal SMSes
Using the Rs 10 recharge, Vi users can also send regular SMS to other users. I personally verified this with my Vodafone Idea (Vi) number. This is a positive development and one that was necessary for the users having their Vi SIM as a secondary number but one that they used for bank verification and more.
There are a number of SMS packs that you can get from Vodafone Idea starting from Rs 10. With the Rs 10 pack, users get Rs 7.47 worth of talktime. There’s also a talktime pack of Rs 4237.29. Keeping the Vi number as a secondary SIM and only recharging it with Rs 10 talktime pack gets me regular free data from Vodafone Idea.
In a bid to promote its services, Vi keeps giving me 1GB of free 4G daily data for seven days in a row at regular intervals.
