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Comment by kamaal | Hacker News Reader

>>It used to be affordable earlier.

It wasn't affordable earlier. In fact internet/data plans were fairly expensive before the 4G days. It's a lot saner now.

>>Companies collapsed and merged and now the duopoly is jacking up prices so much that poor people have to pay 100rs just to keep card active

Please stop spreading lies, I still freshly remember the earlier days of paying some 500 rupees for a recharge and getting barely 150 minutes of talk time and that too with some 25 days of validity. And yeah the SMS, and other services were charged like 1 rupee per SMS.

One of the big wins Ambani claims to have achieved is how Jio exposed scammy pricing practices were in the telecom sector before.

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Lol I have to recharge 260 to 300Rs for 1.5gb dataper day with unlimited calling.both of which I don't use because I do WFH & have to spend 1.5k per month on 100MBPS broadband

I also have to pay 100rs per month to keep my other sim active. Guess what? Before this shit show I barely paid anything as I don't call anyone or use net pack EVER.

But now I have to spend money to keep my number active. And guess what? The cost of doing so keeps on rising.

Probably jio fanbois don't realise this but monopoly doesnt give a crap about you. It's like startups with venture capital.. they give steep discounts to hook you in and then they jack up prices after destroying competition

Sure Jio reduced SMS prices (something nobody really uses anymore). Sure per GB data prices are reduced.. but can you really buy a topup any more only for calling? Nope. They bundle all kinds of crap and sell it for 300rs. How the f** is that cheap? How's that different than the 1re per SMS?

Sto pretending like you're getting a better deal. You're not. Just one year ago we had 45rs recharge to keep phone active now it's gone up to 99Rs starting tomorrow. Stop being an ostrich who hide shis head in the sand because he is too uncomfortable to realise the reality around him

For anyone reading this comment who is outside India. We never had anything called activation charges until very recently. People like the commenter above get a sim and not use it for months without paying anything and the provider had to make sure the number was ON. This became such a plague a provider went down under. Now all the providers came together and decided on a way to stop this from happening. As expected, there is an outrage.

> they give steep discounts to hook you in and then they jack up prices after destroying competition

You bough a Docomo sim. You have a jio sim now too. You don't get to talk about this. Don't be a hypocrite.

> but can you really buy a topup any more only for calling?

Yes. That is literally what I do for my other phone. https://www.jio.com/jio-top-up-recharge-plans

Do you see where it says "top up". Click that thingy and follow the instructions.

> Just one year ago we had 45rs recharge to keep phone active now it's gone up to 99Rs starting tomorrow.

If you're the kind of person who'd recharge for 100 rs and keep it for 6 months and expect top notch service, I hope they jack up the prices for activation to 1000 rs so they drive bad consumers like you out of the market so the rest of us can use the services as intended.

The way I see it, the earlier telecom charges were bad foe those who are using lot of data / calls etc. So post Jio it has been made cheaper for the rich folks

Now it has affected the bottom of the pyramid users.

Daily wage labourers don't have 250rs to spend on telecom per month.

I paid a lot of money to telecom and half the times the calls dropped. So stop lecturing me about how good telecom networks in India really are.

And the only reason you're having no issues with this wide open loot is because you're rich. Look at the rest of the population.

P.s. you claim that I have a Jio sim and I'll never have one. I don't have a jio sim. How the heck did you reach to this conclusion??

>Daily wage labourers don't have 250rs to spend on telecom per month.

They don't have to spend that much on telecom per month. Don't know where you get that idea from.

> I paid a lot of money to telecom and half the times the calls dropped. So stop lecturing me about how good telecom networks in India really are.

I pay a moderate amount of money and I've used Airtel and Jio for a very long time in cities and rural areas and I've had calls dropped maybe 5 times in my life. You must be doing something wrong.

> And the only reason you're having no issues with this wide open loot is because you're rich. Look at the rest of the population.

People with very meagre means have plans that they can use for internet. I'm talking about the bottom of the rung folks.

You must be extremely ignorant of how people use telecom providers or incredibly dense. I don't know which is worse but you're so out of touch with the ground reality there's no point in debating this.

How dense are you towards human suffering? Just because you're rich do you think everyone in India works in IT & earns Lakhs per month?

My parents, as kids were dirt poor family. My grandmother had to go hungry multiple times a week so that my father would get enough to eat. She wasn't "dieting", she didn't have enough money to buy enough food. That's what poverty is like.

Have you ever faced that in your life? You think the really poor people who don't know from where the next meal is coming from have 99rs to keep a number active?

But thank God you have to spend a little less out of the Lakhs you earn in a month on data packs, the data which you use to lecture people whose previous generations have been dirt poor about how 99rs per month isn't that costly. Geez.

This is like the Indian version of "if they're too poor for bread let them eat cake"

Lol jio just raised prices by 20% across all packages

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