If you are following Telecomblogs regularly, then you shouldn’t be surprised over Uninor’s latest tariff offering ‘Dynamic Pricing’ or ’24×7 Changing Discount Plan’. Some of the leading blogs might have covered them already, but most of them won’t tell you how they do it. Telecomblogs is perhaps the only place where you could get insight! Welcome to knowledge portal!
The technology behind tariff plan is provided by Telcordia and I have already covered the same earlier. Let me elaborate. These Next Generation Prepaid plans are made possible due to technology backbone called Intelligent Network or IN. The IN is telecom pre-paid billing machine which keep tracks of money deduction/balance availability/easy recharge etc activities of a pre-paid account. You can imagine IN as a Billing Server, running proprietary software & hardware, which keeps track of your pre-paid billing. So whatever tariff plans (especially pre-paid) are rolled out, they follow a routine cycle– a proposal from Marketing (tariff plan design), which is implemented in IN software algorithm (plan implementation) and then testing by revenue assurance (testing whether plan is deducting money as said to avoid revenue leakages) . At the end, if all goes well, the plan is rolled out to masses.
Now Uninor’s Dynamic Pricing plan is all but a ‘Dynamic Discount Tariff” plan, in which based on subscriber’s location & time, tariff discounts are offered. In other words they are just ‘Location Based Tariff (LBT)’ plans. In short:-
The idea behind the LBT is simple to understand. If you are making calls in/out on your prepaid mobile connection during busy hour from a busy business hotspot, you will end up paying more for your calls. What you could do is to call Operator’s Interactive Voice Services or subscribe to LBT SMS service, to find nearby low congested area, move there and make your calls, which are relatively going to cheaper. This will certainly help operators to better utilize their network resources. This solution is win-win deal, as subscribers get discounted tariffs too while levering traffic load on network.
Now, you need to find out least congested area nearby your location to make discount avail. Move there and make call. Highest discount is available by moving into coverage area of a cell tower which is least congested or carrying low traffic at that particular time ( or during that hour). The discount available to Uninor subscribers is updated every hour and can be seen on their mobile devices. Upon signing up to Uninor’s network, a subscriber can get discount ranging from 5{af589cdba9d77786c8c861317dbad60bba1e2ebbf56e2ffab874a1b59fde9ce3} to 60{af589cdba9d77786c8c861317dbad60bba1e2ebbf56e2ffab874a1b59fde9ce3} on his per-minute tariff plan, based on his location. If he is calling during Busy Hour (e.g. 9-11 in morning or 6-8 in evening) and from location where cell tower is highly congested, he will get least discount. Vice Versa is also true.
More Information about the plan can be found at our weekly ‘Mobile Tariff Alerts‘ under ‘Uninor’.
