One of the questions that a lot of people have in their mind today is, how much more will they have to pay for data once the private telecom operators are done with multiple tariff hikes. In late 2021, Airtel was the first to announce that it will be going with tariff hikes. Vodafone Idea followed it with a similar announcement but implemented tariff hikes a day earlier than Airtel. A few days later, even Jio hiked tariffs of prepaid plans. 

Airtel is eyeing for an average revenue per user (ARPU) figure of Rs 300 from its India mobile business. But the telco won’t be able to do it with a single tariff hike and won’t even wait for too long to reach there. This means that in the span of next two to three years, the prepaid tariffs from Airtel are going to go up by at least 50% to 70% (rough estimation) if multiple tariff hikes are factored. Naturally, Vodafone Idea is going to do the same followed by Reliance Jio. 

So, this begs the question, are we going back to the pre-Jio era where Indians used to pay a very steep amount for a single gigabyte of 4G data? 5G is going to arrive in the country very soon. It will be interesting to see how it affects the amount of data normal users consume. Because with 4G, the more expensive it gets, the lesser people are going to consume it.