Call drop issue: Bharti moves all prepaid users to per-second plan

Move comes to deal with situations where a mobile user is charged for a minute even if the call drops midway

India’s largest telecom player, Bharti Airtel, has moved all its prepaid subscribers to pay-per-second plan, which will ensure users are paying only for the time they use the network.

The move will provide relief to subscribers, as they are being charged for a minute even if their call is dropped midway.

The development also comes at a time when the telecom regulator, Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai), is in the process of examining whether there are any tariff plans by the service providers wherein call drops actually incentivise or benefit the companies.

However, telcos have claimed most of their users are on a prepaid network and in a market where mobile number portability is prevalent, operators won’t resort to such a practice whereby they earn more revenues from different tariff plans.

The Trai’s consultation paper on call drops says otherwise. For the quarter ended March, 2015, 71 per cent of the mobile consumers on a pan-India basis were on per-second-billing tariff plans. However, only 59 per cent of the total outgoing voice usage happened on a per-second basis, which shows the contention of TSPs is only partly correct as about 41 per cent of the total voice consumption happens on a per-minute-pulse in the country.

Earlier, even Secretary (Telecom) Rakesh Garg had said plans where customers got some free minutes and the billing was minute-based needed to be examined.

Airtel has about 233 million subscribers. At the end of June this year, about 94.4 per cent subscribers were on a prepaid platform and most of them were already on per-second billing plan.  Another telecom player Vodafone India has been offering per-second plans to its prepaid users for the last few years. It has about 173 million prepaid users out of a total base of 183 million and most of the prepaid users are on a per-second billing, according to people in the know. Even Idea Cellular’s 94 per cent of the users are on a prepaid platform and a majority of them on per-second billing plans, though company did not share exact numbers. It has about 162 million users.

According to experts, Airtel’s move might push other telcos to follow suit.

According to Trai paper on call drops, users should not be charged for calls that get dropped within five seconds. If the call gets dropped after five seconds, the last pulse of the call that got dropped should not be charged. Trai has sought stakeholders’ comments on how a mobile user should be compensated for call drops — through credit of talk-time in minutes/seconds, credit of talk-time in monetary terms or any other method.