SWITCH OFF 200 MILLION USERS SOON: VODAPHONE IDEA, AIRTEL

These 200 million subscribers are dual sim users, and use lower recharge for only incoming calls.
SWITCH OFF 200 MILLION USERS SOON: VODAPHONE IDEA, AIRTEL

Vodaphone Idea and Bharti Airtel have decided to switch off 200 million users those who spend less than 35Rs a month, from their network, roughly 250 million users are 2G users stand to lose their mobile connections.

Airtel has about 100 million users who are using below Rs 35 recharge a month. Vodaphone has 150 million users who are using below Rs 35 recharge a month.

Airtel has come up seven pan-India plan beginning at Rs 35 and Vodaphone has come out with five plans also with the lowest recharge is Rs 35 a month.

"We have about 330 million customers in wireless, but if look the pattern of consumption across the base you will that there is a very large number of customers, some of whom we acquired from Telenor and some that we have ourselves, about 100 million customers with very low levels of recharge."

"It was a substantial number that was using it either only for incoming or had got recharge below average or that of unlimited costumers. The recharge of unlimited customers is about a fourth of the recharge of customers who take unlimited plans."

The reason behind this is that if the companies get 10Rs recharge every month from these customers then the monthly revenue of the company is 100 crore and if Rs 35 recharge done by these customers then monthly revenue will be 175 crores.

Another reason for this is that companies want to switch off their 2g networks and move the subscribers to 4G. For low paying users, the option for operators is either to compete with Jio's Rs500 4G feature phones which is a costly proposition or focus on high paying customers by moving them to 4G bundled plans which also improve their revenue.

"We have chosen not yet compete in the volte feature phone space because we believe that there are customers already who are using our networks on feature phones. So our focus will actually get them to upgrade directly to Smartphone's."

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