5G plans, be it prepaid or postpaid, will have their swag of being able to deliver super-fast mobile data speeds to the customers. Prepaid plans will obviously be more focused on as postpaid services aren’t affordable for most in India. What no one knows right now is how much 5G plans would cost. Well, we will consider multiple possibilities and see how different scenarios can play out.
5G Prepaid Plan Pricing Strategy by Jio, Airtel and Vi
5G prepaid plans all over the world aren’t way too over the top expensive in most countries as compared to the 4G tariffs. 5G plans are about 25% to 50% expensive on average when we compare them with the 4G tariffs in different countries. In India, it could be the same way. Airtel CTO, Randeep Sekhon told TelecomTalk during a Twitter Spaces interaction that the 5G tariffs will likely be at a slight premium to that of 4G plans. It could simply mean that the starting price of 5G plans would be slightly higher than that of the 4G plans. This is one possibility. The other possibility is that 5G plans come at a super premium to that of the 4G plans. But then, 5G plans might carry more bundled benefits. One thing that 5G would enable is cloud gaming which could be bundled with some of the plans. Cloud gaming services could be bundled for customers with prepaid plans. Along with this, multiple OTT (over-the-top) benefits can also be bundled. What’s worth noting here is that right now, the telcos haven’t given us a single hint about sort of entry-level prices we can expect with the 5G plans. It would be interesting to see how things pan out for the telecom sector in the consumer segment with 5G. If 5G plans are too expensive, consumers will be repelled by them. If they are too affordable, it wouldn’t make sense for the telcos as their return on investment (ROI) would dip. The telcos would have to find the sweet spot of pricing the 5G plans correctly in India. It would definitely require some testing and a lot of feedback from the customers. There aren’t a lot of consumer use cases of 5G. Thus, it would be hard for the telcos to bundle a lot of benefits of 5G that 4G plans can’t offer to the customers. It would be completely a marketing play for the telcos to push consumers to get 5G plans instead of 4G plans.
