Before you succumb to the lure of any tariff plan be it per minute or per second billing, you need to carefully assess their suitability to your calling needs. It is not the type of billing but the applicable unit charges that determine whether the plan is indeed a better option for you or not.
If you compare plans with similar charges, then per second billing obviously is always beneficial. For example, consider per minute billing plan with charge of 60ps/min and another per second billing plan with charge of 1ps/sec. For a call duration of say 2min 30secs, on per minute billing plan you would pay Rs.1.8 (60ps multiplied by 3minutes) and on per second billing plan you would pay Rs.1.5 (1ps multiplied by 150seconds), a clear saving of 30ps per call. Suppose you make 100 such calls in a month your savings would be around Rs.30 per month.
However, several operators already had per minute billing plans with unit charges lower than 60ps when operators started the per second billing marketing blitz. So the question really is, are the per second billing plans worth it? In fact, for long duration calls sometimes the per minute rate plans would be a better option than per second billing.
Let’s find out how:
For example for the same 2min 30sec call, on per minute billing plan at 30ps/min your call charges would be Rs.0.9 while on a per second billing plan at 1ps/sec you pay Rs.1.5 a clear loss of 60ps per call on the per second billing plan.
You could choose a per second billing plan only if:
- calls are of very short duration typically less than 2min.
- the per sec rate is less than per min rate divided by 60.
So, how do I know what’s good for me?
With several attractive per minute billings plans in the market place, mobile service providers realize that customers cannot be taken on a ride with per second billing plans without offering plans with unit charges at less than a paisa per second, and lo some service providers have already started offering per second billing plans at 0.5ps/sec.
Given that most operators now offer several tariff plans with flavors of both per second and per minute billing options, how to choose what is best for you? The decision indeed has become highly complicated with several operators offering per minute billing plans at rates of 30ps/ min, 40ps/min, 50ps per minute and per second billing plans at 0.5ps or 1ps per second.
You must be wishing that a genie keeps tab of all these rates, understands your usage needs and lets you know what is best for you whenever your usage patterns changes or new plans are introduced by the mobile service providers.
There is such a genie just a click away from you. Yourbillbuddy.com, India’s no1. mobile plan recommendation site. You will be surprised that it lets you know what is best for you in just a few seconds. Yourbillbuddy.com understands your mobile usage pattern and compares the plans available in the market both within your current service provider and across all service providers and recommends the best ones tailored to the unique way you use your phone.
