3G Tariff War Officially On

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iS THAT ME

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3G Tariff War Officially On As Vodafone, IDEA and Reliance follow Airtel, Aircel.

3G Networks coming to India was a huge step forward in the Telecom business. The auctions had shattered all records and thousand of crores were paid for licenses to provide 3G in various parts of India. Since no operator had pan-India connectivity, operators got into Roaming Agreements with each other to help out their customers. Unfortunately, the Government did not like this and banned them from doing so. Since their launch over a year ago, most providers have been charging prohibitively high 3G tariffs, in an attempt to recover their huge capital investment of buying the spectrum. In fact, we had even pegged that as the reason 3G failed to achieve any critical momentum in India. Now, this is all set to change.

State run MTNL and BSNL always had the most affordable 3G Data rates, but other factors kept people away from switching over. Telecom operator Aircel started the war last month being the first private operator to reduce 3G rates. After that, market leader Airtel reduced their 3G rates a week ago.

Now, Vodafone (second in the country in number of customers) has slashed their 3G Rates. IDEA Cellular too has followed suit and slashed its 3G Rates. We also have word that Reliance also just reduced the pricing on their 3G Plans too.

The revised plans of these operators can be found below.


Aircel
.


Airtel
.


Idea
.


Vodafone
.


Reliance
.


The fact that most large players have reacted to the price revisions is a good sign for the average customer. So far, 3G charges have been between 5-10 times more expensive than the same 2G EDGE data plans. Further, 3G coverage has been spotty and battery intensive. This has caused a lot of people to give it a miss and stick to 2G, even though their devices can easily support high speed data transfer.

The introduction of more affordable 3G Plans will go a long way in making consumers switch over to 3G. A lot of mobile web services will be able to explore new avenues if more and more consumers switch to 3G. Audio and Video Streaming services too will boom soon as result of this.

We think its only a matter of time before the rest of the operators react and reduce their rates too. This puts 3G within reach of tens of millions of more subscribers. The next few months will be exciting and we hope 3G finally takes off. As the saying goes: better late than never!


Source : http://www.watblog.com/2012/05/23/3g-tariff-war-officially-on-as-vodafone-idea-and-reliance-follow-airtel-aircel-with-tariff-plans/
 
BSNL/MTNL are of Govt. so surely they will make their prices high.
 
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