Mobile carriers are considering creative workarounds to hold on to data customers and reduce the impact of the telecom regulator's latest regulation prohibiting discriminatory pricing of data services.
Potential workarounds being discussed in telco war rooms include creating their own apps/content and hosting them on company servers, bypassing the internet in the process, to even reviewing data pack volume marketing strategies, a top executive of a leading mobile carrier told ET.
The immediate trigger for hosting proprietary apps on company servers, he said, stems from a potential loophole in Trai's discriminatory pricing regulation that exempts tariffs for data services delivered over closed electronic communication networks.
Another top executive at one of India's top three telcos said the very objective of differential data pricing stands negated since operators can effectively "offer anything" as long as it is within a closed ecosystem. "Custom curating and therefore differential pricing can still happen in the way this policy is written," said the second person cited. Another official in the same company feels the loopholes also open up new avenues to grab customers. "As an operator, this is great, we can have captive content, at a captive cost, as long as it is not available to anyone else. It's a great way to capture customers."
But most mobile operators privately agree that the vast swathes of entry-level data shoppers, who typically, buy 1GB 3G monthly data packs in the Rs 170-250 range to savour Whatsapp/Facebook for free, could be in for rude billing shocks.
This, they said, is since such freebies would disappear and costs henceforth would be linked to actual data usage, which, in turn, could see entry-level data users exhausting their data limits far more rapidly and ending up "paying as much as Rs 2,000 for every extra GB consumed". Small wonder, mobile carriers are exploring ways to tweak data pack volumes to address the needs of entry-level data users.
"A possible option being discussed is resizing a mass-market 1 GB data pack, wherein we shrink the pack size to 600-700 MB during peak hours, and give the user an unlimited option during off-peak hours, post 10 pm onwards," said the first executive cited.
Amresh Nandan, research director, Gartner, seconds the emotion. "Telecom service providers may not be happy with Trai's notification, but they have the ability and freedom to create different kinds of internet access packages as long as content is not a parameter to provide or bar access to anyone.
