One of the most popular plan being offered for Unlimited India Calling is now without contract. Vonage Global’s world residential plan which earlier used to come with mandatory one year contract does not have that clause anymore.
Among other things, Vonage has also made the following changes to its Vonage World plan are:
Contract:
Earlier – 1 year contract. Additional cancellation charges if cancelled after the 30 day money back gaurantee period and before 1 year from order payment date
Now – No contract
Monthly Pricing:
Earlier – 1st month free. $25.99/month thereafter
Now – $14.99/month for the first 3 months, $25.99 thereafter
Shipping & Handling
Earlier – Free
Now – Shipping fees is now at $9.95
Money Back Gaurantee
Earlier – There used to be 1 money back gaurantee where users could cancel the services without bearing the cancellation charges.
Now – Looking into the plan details, seems there is no money back gaurantee.
If one considers overall cost for 1 year of usage, it has actually increased from $286 to $289. This increase is marginal and we think users would rather prefer to have Unlimited India Calling services without contract rather than having them with a 1 year binding clause.
Google recently announced the launch of google voice over gmail. As with its other products, google promises to change the dynamics of the industry with technology innovation and superior product features. While this product boasts of many features, we are slightly dissapointed with the rates at which one can make calls to India. Google is offering rates of 6 ¢/min to call India which are much higher to what is being offered currently by calling India specific providers like Relianceglobalcall, airtelcallhome, trueroots etc. For more information one can go to the following rate chart from google.
While the feature to call from gmail can potentially offer convenience in some cases, to be competitive and become mainstream, google would have to lower its rate significantly. It needs to benchmark itself against telecom providers and not just internet telephony providers. It would be interesting to see what new features would google introduce and also potentially integrate its calling services with more products like Orkut etc.
A recent article in economic times has thrown some interesting statistics on incoming calls to and outbound calls from India. Some interesting points are –
- India received a total of 28 billion minutes of international incoming traffic in the financial year 2009-10
- For the same period, the international outgoing traffic was just 6.2 billion minutes. A huge difference of 21.8 billion minutes
This is actually expected. As posted in one of the previous blog posting, it is much cheaper to Call India than to call US from India. There are currently 10 to 15 providers who are providing Unlimited India Calling plans. Consumers have to just pay a monthly subscription fees and they can make unlimited calls to India (provided the usage conforms to fair usage policy of the provider). There is no such provider in India who is actually providing Unlimited International calls to USA from India.
Till now Taraarzu.com has focussed on calling India services only. Today, we added information on money remittance to India services also to the site with the objective of making users more informed and knowledgable before finalizing on the bank/ institution with which they would send money to India. We will try our best to bring forth unbiased reviews, news, trends, important points to consider and community knowledge on aspects related to remittances to India services.
According to world bank figures, India received USD 49.25 Bn in 2009 which made India the largest recipient of remittances in the world. The second largest recipient was China which received USD 47.55 Bn in 2009. All the major Indian banks like ICICI , SBI, Axis, HDFC etc. have huge focus on catering to remittance requirement of Non-Resident Indians (NRI) and People of Indian origin (PIO) community. In addition to these banks, there are other institutions like Moneygram, Xoom, Western Union, Remit2India etc. that people use to transfer money to India.
We are starting with some basic information like current exchange rate, essential points to consider before remitting and dynamic news widget. We plan to add more information and insights to help users take the right decision before they remit money to India.
Web is increasingly becoming more cluttered. Information is becoming more scattered and unstructured. In 2009 alone nearly 47 million new websites were created, taking the total number of websites that are live on Internet to 234 million (source). Any search on Google results in at least a million websites. Now, it takes more time to research a topic on internet than before.
At the same time we are seeing a growing trend of applications that aggregate information and present it in a form that can be easily consumed by the user. In the context of ecommerce, success of comparison sites like Kayak, Shopping.com, lowermybills.com has shown that users like comparison before making purchase on internet. Based on certain estimates, 14% of all the ecommerce shopping happens through comparison shopping websites and this percentage is gradually increasing. This trend would continue and more innovations are going to happen in this space.
Taraazu.com is a simple attempt to aggregate and simplify the information available on the internet for NRIs and present it in a manner such that they can take the right decision with ease and confidence. It has been launched with just one service i.e. India Calling cards and plans with the hope to launch many more services that are important to the Indians living/visitng outside of India.
Gone are the days when it used to cost a fortune to make a call to India. With the advancement of technology and presence of intense competition among players, the cost to make calls to India has decreased phenomenally. When we compare the cost per minute of major providers that provide calling services for both from USA to India and vice-versa, we find that it is actually cheaper to call India from US than calling US from India. Here is an analysis –
| Provider |
Rates of Calls to India from US in cents/min |
Rates of Calls to USA from India in cents/min* |
| Reliance |
1..9 cents/min |
5.5 cents/min |
| Airtel |
1.6 cents/min |
14.2 cents/min |
| Tata (Trueroots & TataIndicom) |
1.9 cents/min |
16.0 cents/min |
* Assuming 1 USD = 45 Rs.
These rates were based on the lowest calling rates to India or USA by these providers in the first week of July and would vary with time. However, it does give a perspective on the difference of rates.
MTNL has recently announced a promotional scheme for its Post paid and Prepaid GSM subscribers for 90 days w.e.f. 01.07.2010 where by it is offering ISD rates at 1Rs. per minute. Details on this scheme can be found here. This scheme would make calling to USA from India cheapest in comparison to Airtel, Tata or Reliance.
