Call at ease

Calcutta, March 21: Reliance Infocomm Ltd (RIL) is planning to offer “seamless migration” to its over six million post-paid customers who can shift to the recently launched pre-paid segment. Sources said under the new offer, an existing post-paid customer can move into the pre-paid segment without changing his current number.

“This is the first time a telecom service provider is offering such a benefit in which a customer can carry his old number. In other companies, this particular benefit is absent,” said a senior RIL official.

RIL, which is the country’s largest provider of telecom facility in terms of customer base, is all set to provide this facility in the first quarter of the next financial year, he said.

Sources, however, said the company is planning to offer this facility only because it has over Rs 1,200 crore of outstanding dues with the existing post-paid subscribers.

What is more important is that the company is yet to send in the bills regularly which is also adding to the problem of non-payment, sources said.

Currently, the pre-paid offer has been doing reasonably well with about 20,000 new subscribers adding to the list every day. “By the end of this fiscal, we hope to be able to garner close to one million pre-paid customers posting a record growth in the country’s pre-paid history,” a senior RIL official said.

The company has already got over six lakh pre-paid customers ever since the offer was launched a couple of months ago. While the pre-paid segment has been doing well in terms of growth, the post-paid schemes have lost steam as the most popular Rs 501 plan has been withdrawn.

“The Monsoon Hangama scheme comprises over 70 per cent of the company’s post-paid subscribers. Since this scheme was temporarily withdrawn, induction in the post-paid segment has been drastically reduced,” sources said.

The company expects to complete the current fiscal with a post-paid subscriber base of seven million. Between July and November, it could garner over 4.5 million customers in the post-paid segment due to the Monsoon Hangama scheme.

While migrating from post-paid to the pre-paid segment, the major problem, however, is posed by the handsets. The majority of the post-paid customers are paying Rs 200 per month as the instalments towards the handset.