Airtel has announced the launch of Happy Hours for its prepaid Customers. "Happy Hours allows Airtel pre-paid customers to get 50% data back for all in-app content downloads scheduled between 3.00 AM and 5.00 AM," the company said in a statement on Thursday.
Pre-paid customers make up 94% of Airtel's over 251 million customer base. The company has over 35 million mobile broadband users.
Airtel's offer comes as “Mukesh Ambani” owned Jio prepares to launch its 4G services commercially, possibly next month.
Jio's entry is likely to trigger a tariff war with existing major telcost including Airtel introducing attractive plans and dropping rates to ring-fence their data users.
Brokerage HSBC expects a drop of 10-15% in headline data rates over the next three months and about 30% by the end of March 2017.
Happy Hours is available to all Airtel pre-paid users by default. Users who already have discounted night packs such as double data packs, will not be eligible for the 50 per cent data back. Airtel will charge 0.4 Paisa/10Kb to users who don’t have a data pack.