Cheap tariff or high quality

Almost all Indonesia telecommunication operators offered a cheat tariff to make a call, SMS and data services to their customers lately even some of them give a free tariff to those services for a certainty period. The question, are they achieving revenue as they have been expected? The second question, do customers satisfy enough with all services offered by telecommunication operators with cheap tariff? Some of us might be wondering how telecommunication operators can achieve significant revenue if they always campaign a cheap tariff to almost their products and services. Meanwhile they need to deploy more and more network infrastructures to support new products and services

We know that if tariff is cheaper than the quality will be more poor and vice versa, if the quality better than tariff will be more expensive. Any kind of industry will do the same once the launch their products and services. How about telecommunication industry? Telecommunication industry is prestigious business. They have high technology to support the business solution and always need to be upgrade. In some cases, if they want to launch new products and services but their network infrastructure is not support than sometimes they must replace the network existing and it is very costly to deploy it. in other word, telecommunication industry is very costly industry, they need high investment to build a network infrastructures. By all of this reason, it means that if they give a cheaper tariff to some of their products and services, the quality will go down than previous one.

To maintain the quality of service during they launch a tariff promotion, usually they place it at low traffic. For example telecommunication operators give a free tariff to make a call, SMS or data service at after midnight until early morning (00.00 to 06.00 AM). In another scenario, they give a cheap tariff for little time after they make a call or send a number of SMS or free access to internet for a mount of bytes and then revert back to the normal tariff. This scenario can be applied at any time.

By applying many scenarios of tariff promotion, telecommunication operators still are able to achieve significant revenue as they expected before. Actually the revenue is less than normal tariff but it is very significant if we see more deeply that almost all telecommunication operators offered the same tariff. Maintaining the customers to keep loyal to them is very difficult if they do not offer the smart solution to them. And the cheap tariff is most relevant solution to face the situation where every telecommunication is trying to get as many as customers. And as the result, it will influence to the quality of services

And as we can see and experience right now, by applying cheap or free tariff to any products and services offered by telecommunication operators, we often experience a problem to their services. Sometimes, our call suddenly drop and it is taking only a few minute to make a call and then it is dropping. Sending a SMS need a long time to reach to destination or very bad connection to access internet through CDMA 1x or 3G. We used to experience this case right now and may be still long time