Telcos reject call for cheaper, standalone voice & SMS plans

Telecom operators Reliance Jio, Bharti Airtel and Vodafone Idea rejected the sector watchdog's proposal to mandate affordable, standalone voice and SMS plans for consumers, even as advocates for consumer rights argued that low-income, rural and elderly users are unfairly forced to buy packs of mobile data even if they don't use them.

Telcos urged the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) to maintain status quo on tariff plans even as the regulator proposed mandating affordable standalone voice and SMS plans (without data) with short validity options, arguing that the proposed mandate is anti-consumer, technically unsound and violates the regulator's long-standing stance on market forbearance.

Consumer advocacy groups and non-governmental organisations, however, challenged the anti-consumer claims of telecom operators, stating that there are an estimated 300-350 million feature phone users, of which around 100-150 million do not use data services. They are being denied meaningful choices and are forced to subsidise data services they do not use, spending about ₹15,000-20,000 crore annually, said the Consumer Protection Association, Himmatnagar, Gujarat.

The stakeholders spoke at an open-house discussion conducted by Trai on Monday on an amendment proposed by the regulator to the Consumers Protection Regulations mandating voice and SMS-only packs.

A Reliance Jio executive said the proposed amendment is technically incompatible since modern 4G and 5G networks are entirely internet protocol-based, meaning voice is simply an application that rides over the data network, and separating the two is not feasible. The country's largest telco also warned that mandating cheap, short validity voice and SMS plans would lower the economic barrier for scammers, leading to an increase in unsolicited commercial communications and fraud.

Jio also said 88% of its entry-level users actively consume data, stating that existing voice-only plans have few takers. Vodafone Idea said not bundling data may result in bill shocks, as incidental background data usage for automatic software updates and OTP verifications would force consumers on a pay-as-you-go rate, causing unpredictable bill shocks.

Bharti Airtel said India's digital public infrastructure is explicitly mobile-first and creating voice-only packs contradicts government's policies and risks creating a structurally data excluded segment.

Consumer advocacy groups refuted the arguments from telcos, stating that in many tribal and hilly areas, telecom towers fail to function and yet consumers are forced to buy data packs they cannot use. They added that the cost of data per GB in the lowest entry-level packs, at ₹94-99 per GB, is much higher than the unit costs in premium plans.