India's largest mobile operator Bharti Airtel on Friday introduced a “per-second billing” plan with a tariff of 1-paisa per second to take on increased competition and attractive tariff plans being offered by its rivals.
Interestingly, the announcement has come just a few hours after the company reported its quarterly numbers.
In this plan, called Freedom Plan, Airtel's customers can now pay 1-paisa per second for all local and national calls on the Bharti network and 1.20 paise per second for calls on other networks.
The new billing system will allow Airtel's 11 crore customers to pay for the number of seconds they talk. Bharti's rivals like Aircel and DoCoMo have offered pay-per-character for SMS and pay-per-second plans recently.
The recent mobile tarff war is being seen as a bonanza for customers but it is going to hurt the bottomlines of the telecom
firms.
Bharti's move may now standardise pay-per-second as the billing norm if other major players like Vodafone also follow suit.
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mobile tariff plan