Your mobile bill just shrank further

Customers can now save up to 20 per cent on their monthly bill as it’s time to pay per second, not minute

You can now save around 15 to 20 per cent on your monthly mobile phone bill, if you belong to circles where some operators have rolled out pay-per-second tariff plans.

Under the pay-per-second tariff plan, which is a mandatory option in many foreign countries, the customer pays for exactly the number of seconds s/he speaks on the cellphone. However, under the current per-minute pulse followed by most operators, the customer ends up paying for a full minute even if s/he uses only a few seconds.

Aarti, a Mumbaikar, says her monthly mobile phone bill has come down by almost a fifth ever since she shifted to the pay-per-second plan offered by Tata DoCoMo. “It allows me to pay for the exact amount of time I consume,” she says.

More than six million Tata DoCoMo consumers, just like Aarti, have already embraced the new plan, which was introduced by the company city-wise from June this year.

“Our pay-per-second billing is based on our brand’s philosophy of charging the customers only for what they use,” says Anil Sardana, managing director, Tata Teleservices.

Pay-per-second billing also keeps users from paying for dropped calls. For example, a 60 paise per call (of 60-second duration) tariff plan would charge the user for one call even if s/he spoke for a few seconds. “Per-second billing also makes a plan less complex,” notes Fitch India Director Abhinav Goel.

Alok Shende, principal analyst, Ascentius Consulting, says users will indeed save on their monthly phone bills. “If you look at the current talk-time patterns, the user ends up paying slightly more than what they have actually used. With per-minute billing, for an ARPU of Rs 250, an individual wastes close to 10 per cent due to the lack of facility to round up the total cost. I think this (per-second pulse) will have an impact of anywhere between 8 and 15 per cent on the billings depending on the usage pattern.”

The newest entrant in the CDMA space, MTS, is offering two seconds of talk-time for only 1 paisa if the user buys a voucher costing Re 1 per day. Aircel, in the GSM space, too has introduced its per-second scheme in circles such as West Bengal and Orissa.

Analysts like Mahesh Uppal predict that prices might fall by another 10 per cent or so and then stabilise.

However, consumers of other service providers may not have to make a beeline for the latest entrants. Older players, such as Bharti Airtel, Reliance and Vodafone, are not jumping on the pay-per-second bandwagon but are keen on slashing their subscribers’ bills.

On its part, Reliance has launched “Simply Reliance Plan” for its GSM and CDMA customers (both pre-paid and post-paid) whereunder all calls will cost 50 paise per minute.

Airtel too has launched its “Advantage Plan” under which you pay an additional amount (Rs 85 for post-paid and Rs 50 for pre-paid) per month to make local as well as STD calls cost only 50 paise to other Airtel numbers.

Vodafone is also allowing STD calls for 50 paise, but consumers need to get a monthly bonus pack and restrict their calls to nearby states only.

Some analysts believe that once more players roll out pay-per-second plans, there may be a hike in per-second charge to make up for the 10-15 per cent revenue loss. Ernst & Young’s Leader (Telecommunication) Prashant Singhal expects that free minutes and free messages that are a part of current tariff plans may be withdrawn. In that case, “the per-second-billing plans would actually cost more,” he says.

With inputs from Shivani Shinde