The party is over, being the first telecom operator to bring down the 3G rates in India, Reliance Communications (RCom) has now hiked its 3G tariff for its prepaid and postpaid customers. With the new rates, customers can now only get 1GB of 3G data usage for Rs 156 per month. In addition to the hiked 3G rates, RCom has also reduced the free data usage offered with higher 3G data plans.
Couple of months ago with big hype Reliance Communications brought down the 3G rates making it in par with the 2G rates, thus making 3G more affordable. It slashed the 3G rates by around 50 percent bring it par with existing 2G data plans. This made huge disturbance in the Indian telecom sector forcing other operators to also lower their 3G data rates.
With the new hiked 3G data rates customers can now only get 400MB of free 3G data usage for a month at Rs 123, which earlier offered 1GB of data usage. Now for 1GB of 3G data usage customers need to shell out Rs 156 per month. RCom also reduced the data usage on Rs 246 3G Mobilenet Plan from 2GB of data to now 1.5GB of 3G data usage and on Rs 492 3G Mobilenet Plan reduced the data usage from 4GB data to 3GB of 3G data usage.
The new hiked 3G tariff will come into effect from 1st December 2013 and applicable to both Prepaid and Postpaid customers pan India. Any extra data usage beyond the 3G mobilenet plans free usage will be charged at 0.3p/10KB.
Hope this time other telecom operators won’t follow RCom’s path and do a revision on 3G tariff. Your thoughts?