After disrupting India's wireless voice sector last year with per-second billing, Tata DoCoMo has followed up with a fresh approach to mobile data pricing – pay per website.
Under the new model, customers who frequently browse just a few websites can elect to pay only for access to those sites for 10 rupees ($0.22) per location per month.
The tariff pays for 200MB of browsing to the chosen site, after which access is charged at Tata DoCoMo's standard rate of 0.01 rupees per KB – which will also apply to off-site browsing.
When Tata DoCoMo introduced per-second billing last year, it set off a price war that drove voice tariffs to record low levels.
Tata DoCoMo's head of VAS, Rishi Mohan Malhotra, says the pay per site model is another “potent market disruptor. The service stands unprecedented in anything that has been... offered before in the market,” he said.
The offer is limited to social networking email and instant messaging sites. Customers can choose combinations of these sites in bundles costing 25 rupees per month for 500MB of data.
Sites available include Gmail, Rediffmail, Yahoo Mail + Messenger, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Orkut and Nimbuzz.