Airtel gets mega bulk subscription deal from Rlys

In one of the biggest deals in the mobile bulk subscriptions segment, Indian Railway has awarded a contract to Bharti Airtel to provide services to its one lakh employees.

The deal is for closed user group (CUG) services that enable subscribers to make calls and send text messages to other subscribers in the group at much lower tariffs.

In this case, Airtel is offering a CUG plan, which would allow Railway employees to communicate with each other for free.

However, they will have to pay a premium if they want to call other mobile users outside this closed user group.

According to the deal worked out with Airtel, there will be a 10 per cent discount for all users on their total bills and the subscribers will not have to pay any monthly rentals.

The tariffs would be revised if Railways takes over 1.3 lakh subscriptions.

Employees would be provided subscriptions under three different plans - national, zonal (North South, East, West) or circle (Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai) CUG schemes.

Those officials who are under the national plan can communicate with all other CUG subscribers for free.
Officials under four zonal plans can make free calls within their respective zones for free, but when they call across zones they have to pay.

For example, a subscriber under North zone plan will have to pay for a call made to users in any other Railway zones.

But he can communicate with another CUG subscriber under Delhi circle (as the Delhi circle is in North zone) plan for free. Similarly, all calls within the circles are free.

If a CUG subscriber wants to call outside the group then he will have to pay between 30 paise a minute and one rupee a minute. The railway employees get a 15 second pulse rate for these connections. The SMS charges are 30-40 paise for local and 60-80 paise for national text messages depending on the tariff plan.

There have been a number of CUG deals in the past but the average size of the network has been around 40,000 users. The one lakh Railway users will add to Airtel’s burgeoning user base.

An Airtel spokesperson said, “We are working with Indian Railways to serve their telecommunication needs on a continuous basis.”