Tata Docomo pricing throws gauntlet
K V Ramana / DNA
Friday, July 17, 2009 1:52 IST
Hyderabad: Tata Docomo, the latest entrant into the GSM-based mobile telephony space, has lined up a tariff plan that could potentially be a game-changer.
Breaking away from the fixed tariff -- the minimum 60-second pulse -- the joint venture between Tata Teleservices and the Japanese telecom major NTT Docomo is offering a billing pulse of one second.
"The response to this has been overwhelming. What we thought of achieving in one quarter has already been achieved in terms of customer numbers in 10 days," Tata Teleservices Ltd managing director Anil Sardana said.
The company, which has licence to operate in 19 circles, has launched services in 5 circles so far -- Kerala, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh and Orissa. It plans to have the same tariff everywhere it operates.
The national rollout will be over by October.
According to Sardana, in the existing plans offered by various mobile companies, customers end up paying for unused minutes.
"Data show excess payment on unused minutes is about 18 to 20% (of a bill). We will charge only for the used seconds and the tariff is one paise per second," he said.
"Under existing tariffs, if a customer is paying 60 paise per minute and speaks for 1 minute and 20 seconds, he is billed for two minutes. The charges would be about Rs 1.20. In our case, since the customer has spoken only for 80 seconds, he pays 80 paise," Sardana said.
Operators have been considering the call termination charges, which are at 20 paise per minute, as a major factor while working on tariffs.
However, another senior official of Tata Docomo, who did not wish to be named, said, the termination charges too are in seconds pulse and Tata Docomo does not see this as a factor in offering the new tariff structure. "We don't pay the operator where the call terminates on minutes pulse. If you speak for three seconds, we pay for three seconds only and the payments are made on a monthly basis. In this, we calculate the total number of seconds used by the customers on our network while making payments to other networks," the official said.
Tata Docomo launched its services in Andhra Pradesh on Thursday. With this, the company has covered the entire South and Orissa.
The company is also working on a handset bundling plan along with Docomo.
In fact, the joint venture is driven by a business and technology cooperation committee (BTCC) with members from both Tata Teleservices and NTT Docomo.
The committee is currently working on the device bundling plan.
"Even in the handset bundling, we are looking at offering value. For instance, we have a plan to offer handsets according to the need of the customers. If a customer wants a handset to keep track of health related issues, we can give him a specific handset. But, we are still working on these plans. We will still call it giving value to customer instead of bundling a handset," he said.
