RelianceIndiaCall vs AirtelCallHome

Some times back Airtel launched a service called "Airtel Call home" at https://www.airtelcallhome.com/. This service was there to give some competition to similar service from Reliance at http://www.relianceindiacall.com/. The calling rate at Reliance were somewhere close to 12.9 Cents per minutes, which was a huge, but was accepted as the call quality and availability was excellent. In addition there were no hidden charges. Well once Airtel came into market, its introductory offer was 7.9 Cents per minutes and double talk time which made a lot of user to shift from Reliance to Airtel. But it looks like Airtel was never ready for that no of users in such a small time and they faced a lot of problem and criticism from many users. e.g. There website crashed, there toll free no was virtually unavailable, users credit card got charged more than once and so on.

This indicates that upper management at Airtel has a very low foresight. Also tech team even dint do enough testing of website before launching it. It does not take a Rocket Science to have website up and running, just need to have proper resources and infrastructure. On the other hand Reliance was quick in responding to it, and introduced the new rates which were close to what Airtel got.

It seemed like the fate of Airtel was closed, and Reliance will be able to retain her monopoly, but in recent past (from mid of Jan) I got some positive response about Airtel and thinking of registering with them as there offer is quite impressive provided they live to the expectation. No matter how is the quality of Airtel but for sure they gave a second thought to Reliance and forced them to get the rates down. Though still Reliance suffers the absence of Double Talk (appropriate one) time offer from Airtel, but it will survive as the quality and service is still better at Reliance, but the case is not going to be the same always. I can see that Airtel is here to survive and give some tough time to Reliance. Who wins this Price war only time can tell but for now consumer is the one who is getting the benefit of it.