TelecomTalk conducted a short survey/poll on its official Twitter handle around tariff hikes that Jio, Airtel, and Vi (Vodafone Idea) implemented. A total of 396 votes came in this short survey. After the closing of the poll, over 33.3% or one-third of the voters said that they were okay with the tariff hikes from the private telcos. But the remaining 66.7% of voters said that they weren’t okay with the tariff hikes. This is interesting data as the telcos state that they want to go with another round of tariff hikes. A Twitter user with the handle @vshalsopariwala replied to the poll tweet that since the fuel costs are rising, then why not the telecom companies increase the cost of their services? The last round of tariff hikes came in December 2021. Private telcos, including Bharti Airtel and Vodafone Idea (Vi), have been very vocal about raising tariffs again in 2022. It will be interesting to see how the telcos will justify another tariff hike without actually improving network coverage and performance.
Rising Data Costs Will Push People to Opt for BSNL Plans
BSNL (Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited) is the only telco that hasn’t gone for any direct tariff hikes in the last few years. That could be one of the reasons why the telco added new active users for consecutive months in 2022. While the telco is working on rolling out 4G networks, it is unlikely that it will hike the tariffs to the level of what the private telcos offer to their consumers. This will make users choose BSNL over every other operator as the secondary SIM option. Otherwise, maintaining an active secondary SIM would become too costly for the users, and India might again become a county with maximum people owning just a single SIM card. Due to cheap data rates from Jio followed by other telcos, the era of two-SIM cards for everyone has been running for the last few years.
