The tariff war is up again in the Indian mobile services domain. With Airtel launching its ‘Airtel Advantage’ plan offering 50 paise per minute for both local and STD calls, Idea Cellular has bettered the offer and is actually offering all STD and local calls for 48 paise per minute.

Idea has launched this new life-time validity voucher scheme in Chennai and Tamil Nadu for its prepaid subscribers.

The tariffs can be availed by purchasing vouchers either of Rs 37 or Rs 95. The Rs 37 voucher offers talk time of Rs 15 while the Rs 95 voucher offers talk time of Rs 70.

Mobile service providers have started to play the price card to increase voice usage of subscribers. They have been reporting decline in revenues from voice revenues off late. While on an average a subscriber makes 134 minutes of local calls every month, the average NLD call usage is only 30 minutes per user in a month. The service providers expect that by lowering the tariffs for NLD calls, the usage of these calls will increase to such an extent they will witness increased revenues from this segment.