Under FTTH, the telecom company is offering three tariff plans. The commercial data plans range from Rs5,999 for 10 Mbps to Rs39,999 for 100 Mbps. The residential unlimited data plans range from Rs1,999 for 1 Mbps to Rs9,999 for 4 Mbps. FTTH voice services are priced at Rs50 for 65 calls, Rs100 for 140 calls, and Rs200 for 290 calls.
There is also a fixed price FTTH voice plan priced at Rs550, which offers 50 free calls.
Coming three months after the rollout of FTTH services in Delhi, MTNL will tap the 26% of its current landline-cum-internet users in Mumbai for this premium service.
With an investment of Rs80 crore in the project, MTNL is looking at adding 15,000 subscribers in the next six months. Till date, the number of MTNL’s FTTH subscribers in Delhi number 100-200.The company is also expecting average revenue per user of Rs700 per FTTH connection.
I love these numbers, they're hilarious.
Although the base price Rs550 falls in line with my own pricing, how can the ARPU be Rs700 when the minimum price is 1,999? Are they expecting 95% of the users to take that 550 voice plan, and if so, who are they planning to trick in to taking fiber to get just voice only? Or do they think they're going to get Rs700 PROFIT per user, which, is simply unrealistic (and a very different metric).
Even with 15,000 users and an 80cr budget, that's still valuing their subscribers at nearly 10x the rate any other ISP values it's subscriber (usually stands at around 6k in Mumbai, or a little over 12 months revenue per subscriber) and against an ARPU that's less than 2x the ARPU of existing providers. Realistically with this budget they should be targeting the better part of 1 lakh customers.
And they're still offering the super-flawed pricing model that they have now - I was speaking to a few people from France and Italy last night who are paying around Rs5k for 2mbit/s and they think it's completely ridiculous!
So, I have to wonder 2 things: where did they find their economics people and after 3 months, why are they even beginning to wonder why their number of FTTH subscribers in Delhi is less than 200? This is like, failure in "Accounting 101".
Sigh. I've tried to explain this to the top executives as well (price more reasonably), but sorry MTNL, #Fail.
