India is going to get 10X price hike for cellular data

[Sukrit Kumar]

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Summary

Airtel one of the most leading brand in India providing cellular connection has announced price hike on cellular data and probably on calls as well. From mostly 10 rupees per gigabyte to about maybe 100 rupees or even more in the coming times for data.

 

Quotes

Quote

Airtel Chairman Sunil Mittal says that instead of getting 16GB data for Rs. 160, subscribers should get only 1.6GB, according to a PTI report

 

My thoughts

As per my thoughts I feel pretty sad, before jio came into the market the prices were kinda like that. I saw this coming about 4 years when jio gave free internet and calls for quite a long time. As the prices of all the operators went down the people started exploring the internet more and now it is there necessity. I'm more sad that i can't watch linus tech tips that much now. JK I have WiFi lol. Hey Riley if you are seeing this post tell linus I am his biggest fan I watch his videos all the day back to back. Please don't remove this post after reading the irrelevant last line It took lot of time gathering all and the correct info.

 

Sources

https://gadgets.ndtv.com/telecom/news/airtel-sunil-bharti-mittal-price-hike-hints-1gb-rs-100-report-2285394

[Spotty]

160 Indian Rupee equals 2.15 US Dollars. People in India are currently only paying 13.5c USD per gigabyte for mobile internet?

[flashiling]

as a danish person i pay 1500 Rupee for 20GB data and unlimited calls/texts, each month

[RTX 3090]

4 minutes ago, Spotty said:

160 Indian Rupee equals 2.15 US Dollars. People in India are currently only paying 13.5c USD per gigabyte for mobile internet?

ikr, sounds pretty reasonable to me. I only have 200mb per month and I pay £3 a month

[Sauron]

21 minutes ago, Spotty said:

160 Indian Rupee equals 2.15 US Dollars. People in India are currently only paying 13.5c USD per gigabyte for mobile internet?

 

16 minutes ago, Anonymous015 said:

ikr, sounds pretty reasonable to me. I only have 200mb per month and I pay £3 a month

Pretty sure wages and the costs of living are a bit lower in India compared to the UK or the US

[Vector0102]

1 hour ago, Anonymous015 said:

ikr, sounds pretty reasonable to me. I only have 200mb per month and I pay £3 a month

In a country where lots of people earn less than 200 dollars a month i think thats a fair amount of change

[Mark Kaine]

2 hours ago, Sauron said:

 

Pretty sure wages and the costs of living are a bit lower in India compared to the UK or the US

Yeah sure, but 10c / *gigabyte* is really extremely cheap, I don't think it was ever meant to be sustainable in the long run.

[Koeshi]

18 minutes ago, Mark Kaine said:

Yeah sure, but 10c / *gigabyte* is really extremely cheap, I don't think it was ever meant to be sustainable in the long run.

Doing some quick maths (using numbers from memory) my home internet works out to about 40GB per 1£ or £0.025 per 1GB.  There may be more costs involved in mobile internet, but this is also in India where costs are lower so this doesn't seem unreasonable to me.

[Mark Kaine]

3 minutes ago, Koeshi said:

Doing some quick maths (using numbers from memory) my home internet works out to about 40GB per 1£ or £0.025 per 1GB.  There may be more costs involved in mobile internet, but this is also in India where costs are lower so this doesn't seem unreasonable to me.

Mobile is way more expensive though. You can't really compare it to house internet when there's completely different,  more expensive tech involved. 

 

On top of my head you get like 4GB for 25€ per month here, which on the other hand is ridiculously expensive,  it's about half that in other EU states (approximately) 

[TetraSky]

Geez, increasing it 10x out of nowhere like that? They could've made it an incremental increase at least.

[RejZoR]

3 hours ago, flashiling said:

as a danish person i pay 1500 Rupee for 20GB data and unlimited calls/texts, each month

I'm paying 877 INR for 35GB here in Slovenia

 

What India is doing is first hooking up everyone on mobile data and then inflate the price. Because that's only thing people can afford there to access internet. Mobile data.

[Mihle]

Here in Norway it is 299 NOK, or 28€, for 5GB

[Vishera]

3 hours ago, Anonymous015 said:

ikr, sounds pretty reasonable to me. I only have 200mb per month and I pay £3 a month

Consider that what we earn in western countries in one day is what Indians earn in one month.

[X-System]

In France, a pack Gigabit FTTH & 4G+ unlimited data mobile & TV for 60,98 €/month

[Sauron]

1 hour ago, Mark Kaine said:

Yeah sure, but 10c / *gigabyte* is really extremely cheap, I don't think it was ever meant to be sustainable in the long run.

I mean... the limits are arbitrary anyway. It's not what they can handle, it's what the costumers are willing to pay.

[CarlBar]

4 hours ago, Spotty said:

160 Indian Rupee equals 2.15 US Dollars. People in India are currently only paying 13.5c USD per gigabyte for mobile internet?

 

Bear in mind the average Indian wage is only approx $1,800 a year, with significant disparity between rural and urban area's. throw in that it's an average and there will be people below that and it looks a lot less reasonable. people in the US earn approx 36 times as much per year, (though according to the world bank it has even worse earning disparity).

[Koeshi]

1 hour ago, Mark Kaine said:

Mobile is way more expensive though. You can't really compare it to house internet when there's completely different,  more expensive tech involved. 

Yes it is more expensive (which I acknowledged), but also India is a lot cheaper to run a business in.

 

Even putting that aside we can see from the data here that in Italy (a country with much higher operating costs than India) the average price per GB is 0.43USD.  So the prospect of the cost in India (a much cheaper country) raising the cost to 100INR (1.34USD) per GB seems completely unfair and unreasonable.

 

18 minutes ago, Sauron said:

I mean... the limits are arbitrary anyway. It's not what they can handle, it's what the costumers are willing to pay.

This is painfully true for pretty much all of the telecoms industry

[CarlBar]

4 hours ago, flashiling said:

as a danish person i pay 1500 Rupee for 20GB data and unlimited calls/texts, each month

 

Your paying 0.75 times as much per GB, but you earn a touch over 35 times as much meaning an Indian is effectively paying a little over 46.67 times as much per GB once you adjust for average wage. This price is the equivalent of you paying 797 euro's for the same data plan. Even the current rate of 160R per 16Gb is equivalent to paying 80 Euro's for the same plan.

[RTX 3090]

2 hours ago, Vishera said:

Consider that what we earn in western countries in one day is what Indians earn in one month

I have family in Pakistan (neighbouring country with same currency) and over there they earn even less money, yet it costs more then India

[BuckGup]

2 hours ago, TetraSky said:

Geez, increasing it 10x out of nowhere like that? They could've made it an incremental increase at least.

It wasn't out of nowhere and people knew it was coming and some have been prepping for it. It's a pretty messed up story but essentially a rich billionaire saw India had no major cell infrastructure and offered great plans for extremely cheap prices. Obviously this led to insane adoption rates and now since he has a monopoly and people are using the service he can charge 10X and people will continue to pay it. He also has no other competition either 

[Mark Kaine]

15 minutes ago, BuckGup said:

It wasn't out of nowhere and people knew it was coming and some have been prepping for it. It's a pretty messed up story but essentially a rich billionaire saw India had no major cell infrastructure and offered great plans for extremely cheap prices. Obviously this led to insane adoption rates and now since he has a monopoly and people are using the service he can charge 10X and people will continue to pay it. He also has no other competition either 

I knew there was some background story to this lol. 

 

I agree tho, it should have been done incrementally, 10x "out of nowhere" or not is pretty hefty! 

[TetraSky]

56 minutes ago, BuckGup said:

It wasn't out of nowhere and people knew it was coming and some have been prepping for it. It's a pretty messed up story but essentially a rich billionaire saw India had no major cell infrastructure and offered great plans for extremely cheap prices. Obviously this led to insane adoption rates and now since he has a monopoly and people are using the service he can charge 10X and people will continue to pay it. He also has no other competition either 

Ah, so that's the backstory on this...

Ridiculous.

Still think it should've been incremental instead of 10x in one go. But I suppose there isn't much in terms of customer protection against this sort of monopolistic BS in India?

[mariushm]

It would be fun for Elon Musk to subsidize his Starlink to Indians, just to mess with that billionaire's plans... pay something like 20-50$ for the modem / sat uplink and then a few dollars a month subscription

[BuckGup]

55 minutes ago, TetraSky said:

Ah, so that's the backstory on this...

Ridiculous.

Still think it should've been incremental instead of 10x in one go. But I suppose there isn't much in terms of customer protection against this sort of monopolistic BS in India?

Yeah I don't think they have anything at all as it wasn't a problem that existed 2 years ago even

[Sukrit Kumar]

18 hours ago, Spotty said:

160 Indian Rupee equals 2.15 US Dollars. People in India are currently only paying 13.5c USD per gigabyte for mobile internet?

yes that's kinda of controversy the isp's has played and some people knew this was coming