Guess Bharti Airtel did not have any choice but to launch free voice calls on its network in reaction to Reliance Jio’s extension of its Welcome Offer.
Now let’s start from the very beginning.
Reliance Jio, a competitor in the Indian telco space introduced a welcome offer in September 2016. The Welcome offer provides free data, voice calls, and Jio apps. India’s biggest industrial house launched its 4G LTE network and offered unlimited free voice calls forever to anyone who signed up for its services. It also claimed to offer the cheapest 4G LTE data rates in the world.
This Welcome Offer saw Reliance Jio garnering 50 million subscribers in 3 months. This got the incumbent operators running scared.
So when the company said it was extending the offer till March 2017, the incumbents had to react.
Airtel came up with two new tariff packs priced at Rs.145 ($2.00) and Rs.345 ($5) allow subscribers make free calls on-net and off-net.
The first pack offers unlimited calls between Airtel subscribers across India, 300MB data for subscribers who have a 4G-supported smartphone, and 50MB of data for other phones. All these for Rs.145 ($2.00)per month.
The second pack offers unlimited calls between Airtel subscribers and subscribers on other networks across India, 1GB of free data to subscribers with a 4G-supported smartphone and 50MB of data for subscribers for other phones.
Now even though Airtel has reacted this way, this is surely going to hurt the company as Airtel makes 70 percent of its revenue from voice calls.
If you were in Airtel’s shoes, would you have reacted this way?
Let us have your thoughts
