Friday 8 August 2014

Whatsapp & Viber Will Now Be Charged

Whatsapp & Viber Will Now Be Charged - TekSea
Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) are now going to think about the messaging apps which doesn’t charge anything to the user of the smartphone except a nominal fee of 2G/3G package. Telecom giants of India like Airtel, Vodafone and Idea will be coming together to reach to a decision soon which will state that messaging apps like Viber, Whatsapp, etc will now be charged.
This means the companies will levy charges on these messaging apps to pay them a particular amount to let their users to access their apps.

Business Today also reported that telecom providers such as Bharti Airtel, Vodafone India and Idea Cellular want the app providers to pay a connectivity charge.

Since we all know that users today are finding it much easier to get these apps on their smartphones without any hassles and charges. Most important is that these apps do not let you pay extra to your service provider except a small internet fee. Having said that, these apps allow you to message and call without any extra charges. Due to which users hardly send a paid text message on which users had to pay very small amount. As per the estimates of the industry, the telecom companies face a huge loss of Rs.5000 crore annually due to the usage of these apps. The TRAI will come up with a decision where these app companies have to pay a fee for the connectivity charge and some amount of share will be given to the government as well.

According to telecom industry estimates, telecom companies are currently losing around Rs 5,000 crore annually due to these free apps. The figure is expected to cross an estimated Rs 16,400 crore in the next two years, as smartphone users are growing rapidly.

A TRAI official said, “We may be asking them to put their servers in India as they get connected to any telecom network in India without getting themselves registered that is something which is also a security concern for us,". If these messaging apps are asked to pay then there are chances that they may not run the app for free too. The upgrades might be chargeable upto 1 dollar or so! Well lets wait till the final decision comes up.

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