The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India has agreed to review its earlier decision to ban operators from giving any monetary value with special tariff vouchers. This comes as a relief to mobile operators that had sent several representations to the regulator demanding that the ban be revoked.
Under the regulation, special sachet plans, which enabled pre-paid mobile users get talk time vouchers for as low as Rs 10, were banned. Until now, mobile companies were selling promotional vouchers that allowed subscribers to get special rates, free talk-time and extra SMSes, over and above their ongoing tariff plans, for a specific period.
For example, an operator recently launched a Rs 10 voucher that gave the user talk-time worth Rs 11 but on condition that the user would use up the value within three days. This voucher had become a big hit with low-paying users, who would buy 3-4 of such sachets a month to make urgent calls. But with the new regulation coming into effect, operators could not offer such plans.
But TRAI has now floated a fresh consultation paper on this issue after the Cellular Operators Association of India (COAI) demanded that operators be allowed to add the monetary value to the vouchers.
“According to them, such vouchers would provide more choice to the subscribers and also would allow flexibility to operators to have innovative bundling of features services,” TRAI said while issuing the paper.
Under the new regulation, operators can still make special offers but they should be part of the normal voucher plans without any fixed validity period. “There is no incentive for service providers to offer such plans now because the margins came from being able to induce the subscriber to use the voucher within 2 or 3 days,” said a Mumbai-based mobile firm.
TRAI had introduced this regulation after it noticed some operators misusing such vouchers to charge extra for bundled services which the subscriber ended up never using.