Feeling the heat of Reliance Jio, incumbent Telecom players recently launched combo packs with bundled data and unlimited voice calls across India.These combo packs launched for prepaid users are cheaper than Jio Plans with 28 days validity. Hence, these recent developments in Telecom Industry could cause a big threat to Corporate CUG Plans that are offered to the employees of large organizations.
Jio disrupted the whole Telecom market in India and made incumbents fall in line with it. Though it is too early to comment on Jio’s success or failure, its positive impact on the Indian telecom industry cannot be ignored. Telecom Industry is dynamic in nature and you never know whats more to come in future. Its quite clear that now Data is the only hot market that will generate revenue for telcos and rates will drop even further making the competition tougher day-by-day.
Corporate CUG plans offer free calls within a certain group in the same telecom circle. The concept of CUG i.e closed user group came into being keeping in mind huge revenue potential from large enterprises. It gave huge amount of revenue to telecom companies and helped reduce bills of their employees by offering value for money enterprise postpaid plans with lots of benefits like free bundled data at much cheaper rates than normal plans offered to the general public.
With emergence of Jio which launched combo plans charging only data and offering free unlimited voice calls to any network across the country, no roaming charge for incoming as well as outgoing calls, free sms etc has forced incumbents to fall in line with Jio or loose their existing business. Looking at the current telecom market, combo packs or plans with unlimited free voice calls is something that will kill the concept of CUG in the near future.
Even if most of the telecom operators would offer similar prepaid and postpaid plans with free unlimited voice calls to any network across the country at cheaper rates, factors such as network coverage, quality of network, data speed, call drops, network congestion and quality customer service will matter the most.
It will be interesting to see how the telecom market evolves in the near future and how telecom operators would find new ways to earn profit.For now, its too early to comment on the future of the CUG concept as a whole.
