Reliance Jio Tariffs Seem Stupid

For the longest time I used a post-paid mobile phone. The hassle of recharging regularly, combined with the attractive rates available on post-paid “corporate” plans, meant that right from the time I graduated business school (in 2006) till I moved to England in 2017, I almost wholly used postpaid phones.

And then in England, I got a prepaid sim upon landing, and then soon discovered that it wasn’t more expensive than a postpaid (and there was no paperwork), and I kept the prepaid. Upon returning to India earlier this year, I’ve continued with a prepaid phone, with a Reliance Jio number. A few months back, I took an annual plan with Jio, paying for a year what I used to pay Airtel in less than two months before I moved out of India.

One of the reasons I don’t really mind having a pre-paid now is that it is far less of a hassle than postpaid. I have a 12 month program, for which I paid once, and until next May I don’t need to worry at all. There is one less bill to be paid each month.

And one thing that makes this “hassle-free” is that I don’t need to check my usage at all, either in terms of voice and data. It is a nicely bundled plan, with zero marginal cost for either calling or using data (the latter up to a (very high) limit). When there is a per-call charge, the balance notification at the end of each call places a mental cost (even if it is a low marginal cost), and you sometimes wonder if you need to call at all, or when you need to recharge.

The “current” zero marginal cost plan by Jio (I had a similar plan from EE in the UK) means that there is no such mental cost, and you can treat your prepaid mobile like you used to a postpaid.

Now things are changing. There are regulatory issues in India – on the “inter connection charge”. When a Jio customer calls an Airtel customer, Jio has to pay Airtel 6 paise per minute for Airtel’s service of completing the call on its network. This was earlier 14 paise a minute, which came down to 6 thanks to Jio’s lobbying, and was supposed to go away entirely in 2020.

When the entire market has settled on a zero marginal cost plan, like it is the case in the UK, inter connection charges don’t really matter. In India, however, there is massive asymmetry. People on older plans from Airtel and Vodafone still pay a lot for their calls, so they don’t mind paying a high interconnection charge, and want to receive a high inter-connection charge.

So over the last couple of months you’ve had massive lobbying, and hilarious exchanges like the debate among the major telcos regarding “missed calls” and how long the phone should ring.

Anyway, it appears that the inter connection charges won’t go away next year as planned. Jio is not happy. And in order to show its spite, it has decided to start charging for calling. A marginal charge of 6 paise a minute is going to be applied on Jio customers calling non-Jio phones.

I don’t see how this is going to be good for the Jio customer (I’m protected since I’d bought a long term plan earlier this year). The mental cost of calling comes back. You need to start worrying about what network the person receiving your call uses. You start getting that balance notification at the end of your call. You might need to recharge before your validity is over, creating more mental cost.

In other words, it seems like a rather dumb move by Jio. While it has clearly been taken to show that the operator is pissed off with the competition and the regulators, it is likely to hurt Ji0’s own business and drive its customers to the competition.

There were several smarter ways to handle this. Basically the problem is that Jio’s costs aren’t coming down as expected, so it needs to charge more. And there are several ways of charging more without imposing a mental cost.

One, the price point itself can be increased. Instead of Rs. 150 a month, it can charge Rs. 160. Second, instead of “unlimited free calls”, they can offer “1000 minutes of free calling per month” or something like that, with a different plan offering 2000 minutes of free calling per month. And so on.

But no. Reliance is more interested in making a statement than serving its own customers. And so it comes up with hare-brained schemes like charging per call “outside the network”. It will be interesting to see how their growth goes like over the next few months.

Why Google, Facebook, etc. are against Net Neutrality in India

I’ve been out of country for close to a month now, so haven’t really been following India news too closely (apart from via social media). But from my (biased 🙂 ) sources I understand that TRAI has put out a discussion paper in which they want to permit telecom companies to charge you based on the service that you use, thus violating Net Neutrality.

Now I’m yet to take a stand on this (this argument by Tim Harford against Net Neutrality is rather compelling, making me believe that well implemented competition regulations can mean we can make do without Net Neutrality, but I haven’t given it too much thought yet), but I have an idea as to why the likes of Google and Facebook, which in the past and in other geographies have come out strongly in favour of Net Neutrality, are okay with Net Neutrality violation in India.

The basic issue in India is with “over the top” services such as WhatsApp and Viber which the likes of Airtel and Vodafone see as a threat for it competes with their rather lucrative voice and SMS business. I’ve mentioned in the past that there’s a quality issue here which the telecom companies can differentiate on (packet switching doesn’t work that well for voice), but given costs it is hard to make a compelling case for using circuit switching for international calls.

So the likes of Airtel and Vodafone are threatened by such services and want to charge users more for using WhatsApp and Viber compared to other applications. Net Neutrality supporters, who argue that internet infrastructure should just be a set of neutral pipes (rather than a “two-sided platform”, as Harford argues), argue that this is unfair, and that Airtel and Vodafone are exploiting their positions as gatekeepers (literally) to defend their own related business.

Coming to the point of this post, entities such as Google and Facebook are coming out on the “wrong” side of the net neutrality debate here in India, arguing that internet companies should be looked at as two-sided platform markets rather than neutral pipes (resisted the urge to use the phrase “information superhighway” there!). Considering that they’re proponents of Net Neutrality elsewhere, why are they taking this stance in India?

Assuming that final regulations come out in favour of net neutrality (treating internet as infrastructure, and not a platform), how should the likes of Airtel and Vodafone react? Clearly their data business is cannibalising their voice business, so they should logically increase their prices for data plans (no brainer). Given that they will not be allowed (in this situation) to charge differential rates based on the service, they will have to uniformly jack up data rates.

This can be troublesome for Google and Facebook on two counts. Firstly, the telecom providers may not get their pricing right, and rather than having a ramp (charging heavy users heavily, since only such people will be using WhatsApp or Viber), they might increase data rates across the board. This will result in a drop in mobile internet penetration (one reason it’s so high now is that it’s cheap), and considering that Google and Facebook are services that pretty much every who uses the internet in India uses, it will result in loss of user base, traffic and revenue (possibly) for them.

The second problem is that even if telecom operators get their pricing right (maintain current pricing for basic plans, but jack up rates for high data usage) it spells trouble for Google and Facebook. One of Google’s widely used services is the video streaming application Youtube, and Youtube consumes high bandwidth. Facebook is getting into native video in a big way, and it is estimated that it might be more successful than Youtube in terms of advertising. And with correct internet pricing under net neutrality, demand for services such as Youtube and Facebook Video will go down significantly, which is not good for those services.

So the simple answer is that the reason Google and Facebook are coming out against Net Neutrality is that they are coming out on the right side of the new proposed (anti neutrality) regulations. Like WhatsApp and Viber, they too are high bandwidth applications, but unlike WhatsApp or Viber they don’t compete directly with the owners of the pipes. Thus, they want providers to have the ability to impose differential pricing, since that will mean that subscribers can access their content for cheaper, and this allows them to make more advertising revenues.

In my view (again note that I’m yet to take a stand on this net neutrality business), this move by Google and Facebook to support the anti-neutrality regulations is extremely short-sighted since it can hit them back at a later point in time. There is no guarantee that in the long term their services will not compete with that of telecom providers (Hangouts? Facebook voice calling?) and the regulations that they are currently supporting can come back to hit them at a later point in time.

It seems that Google and Facebook are working on an assumption that there will not be other high-bandwidth applications that will compete less with pipe-owners (telecom operators) than them (Google & Facebook). They are very likely to be in for a surprise, and end up as the cranes in this Panchatantra story.

Chatting and messengers

So the wife has just moved abroad and I haven’t even bothered getting international calling enabled on my mobile phone. It’s not that I’m not concerned about keeping in touch with her – it’s more to do with the plethora of options to keep in touch with her than a normal phone call.

Firstly there’s whatsapp, which I’ve used for the last two years (the trigger to join whatsapp was the limit in the number of text messages one could send per day which was introduced in 2012 as a “rumour prevention mechanism”). A large number of people on my contacts list use WhatsApp, which means that it is extremely rare that i use normal text messaging to connect to them.

And earlier today, while she was waiting for a connection at Frankfurt airport, the wife asked me to install Viber, saying it allows us to talk without any international dialing cost. I just had a brief conversation with her and the quality was extraordinary (especially given i’m on a weak BSNL broadband here and she was in a car there). Then I looked at my contacts who are on viber, and the number of my contacts who are using Viber is insanely high! Almost makes me seem foolish for not joining in so far.

And then earlier today I spoke to someone in Singapore using Skype. Call quality wasn’t that great – we dropped a couple of times – but it was still pretty good. And then there is google hangouts. And then there is apple’s facetime (perhaps the main reason the iPad fell my side when we were dividing our assets prior to the wife’s move is that I could have an Apple device with me so that we can FaceTime!).

The number of options for messaging is so large that I wonder how long the whole calling and messaging model will continue. I had shown in a recent blog post (on my public policy blog) that the number of SMSs sent per user in India peaked three years ago and has then been on a secular decline. And now there is news that the telecoms regulator in India is thinking of instituting a fee on providers such as WhatsApp and Viber because of the revenue losses they are causing to the mobile phone service providers in India (like Airtel, Vodafone, etc.).

The question therefore is what the future of telecom will look like given the large number of internet based reliable communication providers who are springing up. My prediction is that the phone call is not going to die – what sets apart a phone call from a Voice over IP connection (such as Skype or Viber) is that it is “online” (i forget the technical term for it – ok got it it’s “network switching” as opposed to “packet switching” which is how the internet works).

To explain that in English, when I talk to you over the phone (normal phone call) there is a dedicated line that goes out from me to you. Basically your telecom provider and mine and the network interchange come together so that a virtual line is drawn from me to you, and this is exclusive for us as we talk (call dropping on mobile phones happens when we try to move from one “cell” to another and get lost in between).

The internet doesn’t work that way. When I send you a “voice message” over the internet, it goes one hop at a time. There is no dedicated line from me to you. The reason we are now able to voice chat online reliably is that the bandwidth available is so much that packets usually get connected quickly enough (think of a bus network so dense that you can change buses instantly to get to your destination – it virtually simulates a “direct bus”). When the network is busy or the bandwidth clogged, however, there might be some delays (while a phone call once connected remains connected).

Given this distinction the phone call offers a level of reliability that packet switching based voice messengers can never reach. And there will always be a market for extremely high reliability. Hence the phone call is not going anywhere.

The SMS, on the other hand, is again packet switched, and a mechanism in which carriers could extract large amounts of money. The SMS will soon die a natural death – kept alive only by means of government mandated services such as two factor authentication of credit card transactions.

While the fees on carriers such as Viber might become a reality in a place like India they are unlikely to sustain as international norms become uniform. What we are likely to see instead is mobile carriers coming to terms with existence of such providers, and some interesting internet pricing plans.

Currently, to use Viber for a fair bit you need a fairly high FUP (fair usage policy) limit on your phone (carrying voice digitally takes a lot of bandwidth). Carriers might introduce some kind of a graded payment structure such that they can partly recover (through higher internet charges) the lost revenues thanks to lost call charges.

If any mobile phone operator is reading this and needs help on devising such pricing mechanisms, feel free to use my consulting services. Among other things in the past I’ve done revenue management for airline ticketing and cargo (the holy grail of revenue management) while working for Sabre – the pioneer in revenue management.

Internet subscribers in India

The government data portal has released data on the number of internet subscribers in India over the last 5 years.

Going by this data, the number of internet subscribers increased steadily until 2012, but then decreased a bit between 2012 and 2013.

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The market  grew 19% from 2009 to 10, 22% from 10 to 11, before slowing down to a growth of only 13% between 2011 and 2012, and actually decreasing by 5% to 2013.

The question is whether the market share growth varied by provider. The next two graphs show the total number of subscribers per provider and the market share of major providers, respectively. All data here is from data.gov.in

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It is interesting that while BSNL continues to grow, the number of subscribers of MTNL has gone down. This graph also helps put perspective on how small Airtel is!

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What would add to this analysis is data on how much data actually passes through the pipes of various providers – once that is taken into account, I think we should see that market share of providers such as Airtel and RCom (which supply to businesses) would b e much higher.