Unitech Wireless to offer post-paid connections this year

CHENNAI - Unitech Wireless, which entered the mobile telephony market late with only prepaid tariff plans, will offer post-paid connections this year, a company official said here Monday.

“Our focus this year will be on post-paid connections. Our ratio of prepaid to post-paid will be 80:20 in line with the industry trend,” Stefan Kercza, head (Tamil Nadu and Kerala circle), told IANS.

Unitech Wireless, which started its services last December, has a pan-India subscriber base of around 4.2 million.

Kercza is confident the client base would go up owing to its new tariff plan that offers a discount of 5-60 percent on the basic call rate of 0.50 paise per minute, but declined to hazard a guess as to the number of new subscribers the company would get in Tamil Nadu.

According to him, the scheme is to make optimum utilisation of network infrastructure.

Further, as Indians prefer to go in for discounts, such a plan is expected to increase traffic as well as the revenue for the firm.

Subscribers of the dynamic discount plan will get an hourly message on their mobile as to the discount percentage that is available.

The discount rate would differ from cell tower to tower based on the call traffic.

It is somewhat like happy shopping hours in big retail stores when products are offered at a discounted rates.

At all times when a subscriber plans to makes a call the discount percentage available at that particular point of time will be visible on the screen.

“Many of the existing players have been trying to launch a dynamic discount tariff plan but were hampered by software glitches. We have become the first player to offer such a tariff plan,” said Kercza.

He said dynamic discount tariff plans are in existence in countries like South Africa, Uganda and Congo.

He said cell broadcast technology that enables such new tariff plans will rule in the future and disagreed with the view that the new tariff plan would brand the company as a discount telecom service provider.

Kercza said in two or three weeks’ time the company would come out with another tariff plan.

In Tamil Nadu, Unitech Wireless’ has a subscriber base of around 630,000 and the average revenue per user (ARPU) ranges between Rs.250-Rs.350.

“Our blended tariff rate is around 0.45 paise per minute,” Kercza added.

On value added services, he said the company was not focussing on that space now.