Lost business of “Missed Call”

Lost business of “Missed Call”
We all read about the India Mobile story; its growth, its SMS, its Arpu, its 550 million users and now its new operators. Last year a few more new licenses were released and this led to DOCOMO, Telenor, and Etisalat entering the market. Currently these new operators have set the market price on fire. In case of DOCOMO, the customer pays
All Local Calls — 1p/second; in USD 0.022c/second
All STD calls (long distance) — 2p/second; in USD 0.043c/second
via one of its plans.
However attractive the tariff plans are will it replace the business of “Missed Call”?
So what is this phenomenon of “Missed Call”- missed call alert, is a preferred way of communicating mainly among those who want to limit the amount they spend on their monthly mobile billing or the lower income population. In most cases, the missed call arrangement is made by your chauffer, your maid, your taxi driver or auto rickshaw driver. Missed call has replaced the phenomenon of voicemail. Instead of leaving a voicemail, mobile users in India prefer to dial a number, let it ring a couple of times and hang up. The person who gets the missed call knows that someone called them. The missed call can be a pre-arranged signal or message to mean something specific like “ I am ready to leave the office” or “please pick me from the location you dropped me,” or “I am home and you can come and clean-up?” etc. These short missed calls are often signals to your service provider that you have arrived. One can almost call it a pager system but without text. But if one is still unable to get across to the service provider, then it is the SMS that takes over.
So how does this work? Unlike in the western world where we have to live with plans, most of the low income mobile users in India go for pre-paid plans. They put a little money on the prepaid card that enables them to receive free incoming calls. At the same time they can still make use of basic services such as SMS and when required a phone call.
As we can see this “Missed Call” is a big business opportunity where majority of the communication is done for free. Most likely with new tariff plans the business of “missed call” will continue without generating revenue, but the operators hope they may be able to reverse this trend and try to get at least 20% of this lost business.