As past masters of aggressive competition and ruthless marketing tactics, Reliance bigwigs know too well that their rivals won’t take things lying down. Just days after Reliance Infocomm announced the launch of limited mobility telecom service with three schemes, including a unique three-year Dhirubhai Ambani Pioneer Offer at Rs 3, 000, chiefs of rival cellular firms, carrying on their services on GSM based technology, like Hutch (which includes Orange), Airtel, Idea (AT&T), BPL, Spice etc. have come out with a strategy to take them on by slashing mobile service rates. At the moment, all this means good news for the customer.
As per Reliance’s Pioneer offer, the booking for which ends in March, subscribers would get one free digital mobile phone worth Rs 10, 500, unlimited free incoming calls, 15-second pulse rate and free outgoing calls for 400 minutes. Within the plan, the cost of a STD call is 40 paise a minute and that of a short call up to 15 seconds will be only 10 paise. This was announced last week by Reliance Chairman and Managing Director Mukesh Ambani. He added that the scheme also allows for exchange of current handsets and discount coupons for various products.
The wireless in local loop (WLL) facility, eventually, would connect all the 6, 40, 000 villages and 2, 000-odd towns in the country with the outside world in a seamless way. Moreover, the service based on code division multiple access (CDMA) platform would provide messaging, business transactions, videoconferencing, music download and movie download services.
The Reliance Infocom provides the users with a choice of three different brands of CDMA based mobile phones, i.e. Kyocera, LG & Samsung, each of which has different models to match with the need and the budget of the user. Samsung & LG have simultaneously introduced the Java enabled instruments for the CDMA users, to facilitate them to access the Internet on their handsets, using the Reliance Infocom service. It is believed that most of these handsets are manufactured by Reliance itself in it’s factory set up in Gujarat under the respective brand names.
To race ahead of others, Reliance Infocom promises its users, Internet access, Short Messaging Service (SMS), & Voice Mail service to be FREE of cost for the next 3 years.
Soon after Reliance Infocomm came out with its proposals, cellular operators and other limited mobility operators have taken a guarded approach to the tariffs. Putting up a brave face, cellular firms believe that, at the first glance that the Reliance tariffs do not seem to be ‘predatory’ and can be matched. Most subscribers in the market are the pre-paid card types who will not pay anything more than Rs 300 a month. They would certainly think a thousand times before going to pay for thousands as deposit for getting a subscription of Reliance CDMA based mobile phones.
The rival cellular firms, names as mentioned above have at present reduced the rates of STD calls done for a distance of 50 + kilometres from mobile to mobile to Rs. 2.99 flat as compared to Rs. 9 previously. This is just a beginning of the intense competition which is going to prevail in the Indian markets in the coming days.