The word unlimited has been thrown around in the telecom industry a lot these days. There was a time half a decade ago when everything was written down in numbers and there was no concept of a free lunch when it came to data and talking on calls. The calls were charged at a premium and data was considered a luxury. However, the times have changed drastically and now data is aplenty available in SIM cards and wired broadband connections alike. However, in a dogmatic approach, I talk about why a truly unlimited data plan does not make sense to buy, and even for the telecom companies to offer.
The Story of 3,300GB Data Per Month
Although the wired broadband plans offered by companies like Bharti Airtel under the Xstream Fiber banner and by JioFiber come with the tag of unlimited data, the most data that they offer is 3,300GB or 3.3TB. When the news came out, clarifications came from the telecom companies that this figure is accurately true, however, what followed after this was a barrage of negative comments about misleading the marketing it. While the reactions of the customers are not entirely false, but the companies offering 3.3TB data per month under their broadband plans are not astray as well.
To put it into a picture, 3,300GB of data on average translates to 110GB of data per day. If you were to download and watch a movie in FullHD on your desktop or TV, the data incurred would be somewhere near 2-3GB. Even with multiple people at home, it is quite unlikely that the customers will run out of this huge amount of data by the end of their month. With IoT devices making their way into the market and streaming becoming increasingly common, the 3.3TB limit is justified because it’s simply too high for the common man’s usage.
What to do If Not Unlimited Data?
On the other hand, there are tons of broadband service providers, some of whom have partnered up with LCOs to provide connectivity to the subscribers and others which are limited to certain locations. These broadband service providers have come up with plans that offer truly unlimited data, however, in almost all cases, these plans run very high on the pricing spectrum. Even then, the lure of truly unlimited data does not elude people as they end up purchasing these plans for the fear of running out of data in the middle of their work.
We would like to bring to highlight that despite the heavy work usage, the 3.3TB limit seems utterly justified for the telecom companies as it happens to be way more than what an average Indian household would use in a day. In an environment, where 1.5GB per day prepaid data packs have found their foothold, and some of the most bandwidth-demanding services are only brought by the premium customers, the application of a truly unlimited plan seems unreasonable. Rather than spending on the monthly rental of truly unlimited plans, the subscribers would be better off recharging their account with add-on data packs as per their needs and saving a lot in their pockets.
