A new war is being fought on the Mumbai telecom turf. For the first time, BPL Mobile introduced a one-second pulse rate in the cellular telephony market.
The service provider moved to the new slab from the existing 60 seconds while announcing a new tariff card from Wednesday.
While BPL's prepaid subscribers will be charged a standard tariff of 3 paise per second for local calls, post-paid subscribers will be charged a flat rate of 2 paise per second for all local calls.
However, all subscribers will have to shell out 60 paise as IUC (interconnect usage charge, usually paid by the operator to either MTNL or BSNL) for every call they make.
This means the prepaid scheme will cost Rs 2.40 per minute - much above the Airtel and Hutch plans, which charge you about Rs 2 per minute.
However, the BPL scheme is cheaper compared with rivals till the 46th second of a one-minute call. After that, it is costlier than Airtel or Hutch till 120 seconds.
From 121 seconds onwards, it is again cheaper than the other two till 180 minutes, at which point, the BPL tariff is exactly the same as the Airtel or Hutch tariff. The BPL plan will be cheaper by 20 paise every next minute hereon.
There is more. Both the pre-paid and the post-paid subscribers can avail of a special scheme at a monthly cost of Rs 25, wherein calls to all GSM mobiles will be charged at 1 paise per second.
The post-paid customers of BPL will continue to pay a monthly rental of Rs 175. This is more than what Airtel and Hutch charge -- Rs 150.
A one-minute post-paid call on BPL will cost Rs 1.80 per minute to all types of phones, while charges for the same call on a Hutch are lower at Rs 1.69. On the other hand, an Airtel-to-Airtel call is cheaper at Re 1, but an Airtel to other phone is costlier at Rs 2 per minute.
Industry observers said, "This is the first time that the `pay as you talk' regime has come into effect. Eventually all the service providers will move on to this sort of a system."
"Our tariffs are compliant with the guidelines set by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India. Currently tariffs from cellular operators no longer require prior approval from TRAI and in line with the industry practice, we have already filed the tariff with TRAI," Angara pointed out.
Krishna Angara, executive vice president, business operations, BPL Mobile said, "We want to offer a customised service to our consumer. We believe that it is fair to charge the consumer only for the actual usage and not more."
STD rates to all types of phones have also been slashed by the company to Rs 2.99 per minute. This gets reduced further to Rs 2.25 per minute, if one pays a monthly fee of Rs 25.
BPL has also retained its old pulse rate of 60 seconds for subscribers who do not wish to switch over to the new system.
"Although we do expect some amount of decline in our average revenue per user due these new pulse rates, we expect to compensate by bagging more subscribers," Angara said.
The company has also put in place a new billing system to comply with the new pulse rates and tariffs, he added.