Following the recent tariff hike spree by India's top telecom giants, the Indian consumers are on the verge of spending an additional amount of whopping rupees 47,500 crore annually, according to a research by Kotak Institutional Equities.
India’s top 3 telecom operators, Reliance Jio, Bharti Airtel and Vodafone Idea, recently increased the monthly tariff in a bid to effectively monetise their new 5G services and put an end to the price war among telecom operators.
About the current rates
As per the revised rate chart, Reliance Jio raised prices by 13%-27%, Bharti Airtel raised by 10%-21%, and Vodafone Idea raised by around 10-23%.
For a 5G data plan must, a Jio customer has to pay a minimum of ₹349 for a 2GB a day pack instead of the earlier ₹239 pack with 1.5 GB a day.
An Airtel customer wanting 5G now has to upgrade to a ₹409 pack with 2.5GB of data a day, instead of the ₹239 pack with 1.5 GB a day earlier.
Why were tariffs hiked?
Acoording to Bharti Airtel’s MD Gopal Vittal and Vodafone Idea’s CEO Akshaya Moondra, the pricing structure in India had to change to the global standard where users are habituated to paying more for using more data.
The telecom price war in India was instigated by Reliance Jio which introduced the concept of using low prices to bring in subscribers, which lead to competitors like Airtel and Vodafone to do the same to not risk losing their customers.
