Tata dumps call pulse rate

Chennai/Hyderabad

Sept. 1: Potentially triggering a price war among Indian telecom companies, Tata Teleservices on Tuesday introduced a fixed charge plan, where customers are charged on the basis of the number of calls they make rather than the time they talk.
In the new ‘Pay-Per-Call’ plan, the company’s pre-paid CDMA subscribers will be charged Re 1 for all local calls and Rs 3 for long distance calls, regardless of the duration.
Tata Teleservices and Indicom subscribers could shift to the new plan by paying Rs 30 monthly. The call rates would apply on mobile to landline and to calls made to other networks. The plan also offers subsidised rate for SMSes at Re 0.50, for both local and national SMS.
“Pay-per-call will change the pricing paradigm in the telecom space and endless talks does not mean the caller will misuse the facility as there will be monitoring of the calling pattern of subscribes once any abuse of the scheme is noticed,” said the Tata Teleservices managing director, Mr Anil Sardana.
Though the plan has no pulse rate for 15 days, the company would impose a cap on the call duration, if required, after studying the pattern during this period.
In Hyderabad, Mr S. Ramakrishna, the regional COO, AP and Orissa circles, Tata Teleservices, said the Pay Per Call plan is initially being introduced on the pre-paid platform. The service is available on all new Tata Indicom connections.
The company expects volumes to make up for the loss of average revenue per user in this plan. Tata Teleservices’ CDMA service is pan-India presence with a subscriber base of around four crore.
Sources, however, said that the company will restrict the per call duration to 10 minutes.