Airtel updates IndiaOne Calling Plans – Makes them more attractive [Updates]
| By Alok Saboo on August 23rd, 2009 |
We reviewed the Airtel India One plan earlier. While the plan was decent, there were two major concerns with the plan:
- High administrative fees ($3.99)
- Low validity of only 30 days to use up the 600 minutes.
Airtel seem to have listened to this feedback and revised its India One plan to at least (partially) take care of the validity issue. Under the revised plan, you still pay a (rather high) administrative fee of $3.99, i.e., you get a talk time of $6.00 or 600 minutes of India calling. But, you now have 45 days to use these 600 minutes, which is much more reasonable. To summarize, for every $9.99 you get 600 minutes of talk time and you have 45 days to use these minutes. The effective calling rate is 1.67 cents per minute (and not 1cent per minute) as advertised by Airtel, which is still reasonable given the reliability of Airtel.
However, if you make calls mostly to Gujarat in India, you should consider the Aapno Gujarat Plan where you can make calls to Gujarat for only 0.9 cents per minute. However, the plan has an administrative fee of $7.49. Under this plan you get 1389 minutes of Gujarat (India) calling for only $19.99 and you have 60 days to use these minutes. The effective calling rate is 1.44 cents per minute, which is much better than the India One calling plan.
Please note that the rates mentioned above are only applicable if you use their regular access numbers. If you use the toll-free numbers the rates go up dramatically. Find out how you can save your local minutes while using these access numbers. Also, the rates will go up if you are not able to use the minutes within the validity period, yes they do not allow you to carry the minutes over. But, if you can use up the minutes within the validity period, this is a great option to consider to make cheap calls to India.
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