Bharti Airtel Limited, fondly known as Airtel, announced a sudden rise in the tariff rates for voice over services. This came to the Airtel subscribes as a jolt as they were soon to be charged, according to the number of minutes, instead of the amount of data.
So what was the justification of this largest provider of Mobile Telephony?
Airtel has invested over Rs. 140,000 crore in the past three years to uprise the network that will persist to count users for VoIP services.
This second largest Asia Pacific mobile operator was now certainly finding itself in a vicious circle, as the consumers expressed their disappointment on various social media. Petitions to protect the net neutrality gathered over 2,000 signatures while these topics from the netneutrality.com got shared for over 20,000 times on Facebook and Twitter.
Furthermore, hashtags like #ChindiChor, #BoycottAirtel became popular on Twitter, while some were terming this scenario as an ‘Evil Santa’.
Seeing this large dismay of people, Airtel has now decided to withdraw this decision of increasing the VoIP charges.
The latest announcements from Airtel says, “In view of the news reports that a consultation paper will be issued by TRAI on issues relating to services offered by OTT players including VoIP, we have decided not to implement our proposal launch of VoIP packs.”
Consumers also affirm that they have already paid for the data and would not end up paying again, while Telecom Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad is rather staying placid and has accorded to look into this issue.
Tags: Airtel VoIP
