Airtel and Vodafone Increase In Tariffs This Year

The second increase in tariffs this year,leading telcos Bharti Airtel and Vodafone India have nearly doubled the price of 2G mobile data services by slashing the one gigabyte (1GB) offer provided for Rs. 155 earlier to 512 megabytes (MB) at the same tariff-data availability has been reduced by nearly half for smartphone users. As a reason ; An Airtel official said, "We did this sometime back in a few circles. Other telcos like Vodafone have also followed suit. Many of our prepaid customers may have now received our revised 2G data plan after they have exhausted their discounts and freebies offered for 2G data." and an official of Telecom regulatory Authority of India said, "Cash-strapped telcos have adopted a strategy to propel first-time smartphone users to use 3G and push their existing 2G data users to experience faster speed on 3G. Clearly, the move is to pull out all the stops to cover costs and improve margins" . As smartphone users have largely stuck to 2G data services the tecols cann't increase data tariff .  On the other hand, telcos have seen less growth(almost 8%)in 3G data services, Though number of smartphone users has gone up by 205 per cent in a year,