How low will they go?

Lowering SMS rates has been the latest (and greatest?) move by service providers in the bid to get more customers on their service. Originally started by Telenor, with their Djuice offering, which took SMS rate down to 20 paisa's (to any network) from the prevailing rate of Rs. 1 (for local) and 1.5 (for other networks) in the market.

SMS (or Short Message Service) has taken the world by storm in recent years, after it was 'accidently' left in the network design by the original engineers of GSM network, because they had some bandwidth leftover. The original use of SMS was to transmit and recieve troubleshooting messages over the network, so as to provide better service to its users. However, as soon as it came into the hand of consumers, they exploited it as best as they could.

Following the move by Telenor, Paktel offered up its 10 paisa per SMS package to the public. The last to cash in(?) on this wave was Ufone, which has come up with a slightly different offering. Instead of introducing a new package, they now offer people to buy SMS bundles of Rs. 25 to 125 which allows them to send from a 100 to 1250 msgs in a month. The bundle expire in a month and any sms's sent in that duration, will be subtracted from the total bought, and not charged seperately.

So who's next now? Mobilink and Warid, both show no signs of offering up new SMS rates, as they're concentrating on voice calls and value added services to profit. They surely can, since these are the top two providers (# of consumer-wise) in the country.