Bad news for mobile data users. Soon these users may have to pay double or triple the price for recharge. The founder and chairman of Bharti Airtel, Sunil Bharti Mittal, has indicated that the customers should be prepared to pay a higher price in the coming time, hinting a large tariff hike. He said that if you are paying INR 45 a month now, soon your bill will increase more than double to INR 100 per month.
1 GB of data might cost 100 rupees
Soon customers might get only 1.6GB of data for INR 160, or they will have to be ready to pay a higher price. Mittal said that we do not want 50-60 dollars like the US or Europe, but giving 16GB of data per month for INR 160 is not sustainable. He said that users should get 1.6 GB of data at this price. This simply means that 1 GB of data is available for 10 rupees now, will increase to 1 GB for INR 100.
Let us say that currently, Airtel is offering 1 GB of data per day for 24 days for INR 199. If you look at Mittal’s statement, the data benefits will come down ten times to 2.4GB in the coming times. Not only this, but the price of minimum recharge will also be at least INR 100 per month, which is currently INR 45.
Also read: Airtel replaced rivals in performance metrics
Loss of subscribers base
Telecom companies have suffered a big loss of subscribers. As per the TRAI’s data released on Wednesday, the number of telecom users in the country declined to 116.36 crores in May 2020. During this, Airtel and Vodafone lost 47 lakh users. However, this time the telecom operators had tried hard to reduce the subscriber losses. This has resulted in a decrease of 85.3 lakhs in the subscriber base in April 2020 to 57.6 lakhs in May.
Need to increase revenue
Sunil Mittal says that the Average Revenue Per User (ARPU) at an average of INR 300 is needed, to make the industry sustainable. He said that in the next six months we will definitely cross the level of INR 200 ARPU and maybe an average ARPU of INR 250.