i still do not understand why people keep on praising reliance for the mobile revolution they gave us.
ok. they launched some phone devices really cheap. and their initial plans were rather amazing for that time.
but they also lowered the standard of quality of services we expected from mobile service providers.
let me get some facts right for you. At the time Reliance CDMA was launched, no Mobile operator (including Airtel and Hutch) was offering customer support to prepaid customers through a call center. I still remember visiting connaught place showroom of Airtel to straighten the matters with my Airtel prepaid connection, which was called Airtel magic at that time. Reliance had a call center offering voice support by decently trained support staff from the day they launched their services and Airtel, Hutch etc. followed reliance by offering customer support by phone for prepaid customers for the first time. It is another matter that with ADA taking over RCOM, the quality of service went down. But service quality is not much worse when compared with say Airtel or Vodafone.
Further not only the initial plans of Reliance were amazing but their price plans have been much better than the other operators even today. Even with rather sub-standard customer support staff, Reliance is still offering lowest tariffs and have forced all operators (including craptel and khotafone) to fall in line and offer similar lower tariffs and that is a big positive from the POV of customers like myself.
---------- Post added at 05:19 PM ---------- Previous post was at 05:14 PM ----------
IMO, it was Airtel with their lifetime-prepaid offer.
TATA DOCOMO has also played a major role in cutting prices. 1p/sec is cool! 1p/2sec is even more cooler which is what I'm enjoying right now!
Lifetime prepaid plans were offered by Tata Indicom first.
Airtel was the last major company to offer prepaid lifetime plans. As late as 2009 november, only prepaid lifetime plan from Airtel had local call tariff of Rs1/minute, when all other operators were offering 1paise per sec or 50 paise per minute.