MTS abolishes tariffs with unlimited mobile Internet
"Unlimited" all.
MTS was the first major telecom operator to refuse to provide mobile unlimited access to the Internet,Vedomosti reports .
Under the reduction got the tariff plan "Unlimited" . Now, all subscribers who subscribed to this tariff plan on March 27, 2017 and later will receive 10 GB of incoming traffic instead of unlimited access to the Network. The package price is 550 rubles.
According to Vedomosti, other tariffs of the Smart +, Smart Top and Smart ULTRA operators also have traffic restrictions (7, 15 and 20 GB respectively), but on the MTS official website, the Smart + tariff is still listed as a package with unlimited Internet.
MTS representatives claim that they analyzed the traffic consumption by users and came to the conclusion that subscribers with unlimited access, for the most part, consume no more than 5-6 GB of traffic per month. Accordingly, from these figures the tariff scale of the company was adjusted, which will cover the needs of the vast majority of customers.
For those who need large volumes, MTS suggests choosing a more expensive tariff plan than Unlimited.
Talk about the refusal of cellular operators from unlimited tariffs began in 2016. In December, VimpelCom CEO Schell Morten Johnsen said that the rejection of "unlimited" will not hit ordinary users and will affect only some customers.
“You will see step by step that the industry will gradually move away from unlimited tariffs. Users with normal data consumption will not see the changes, but this disciplines people who use an extremely large amount of data, ”Jonsen said then.
The general director of VimpelCom also noted that his company alone would not be able to make such decisions, so the rejection of unlimited Internet access tariff plans, if it happens, will be widespread among all major telecom operators in the Russian Federation. The first step was made by MTS.
Earlier, MTS tried to deal with customers pumping out hundreds of gigabytes using the mobile Internet. Thus, one of the measures in May 2016 was to secure the company’s right to limit the speed of access to the network unilaterally. This practice has been applied to customers with “abnormally high consumption”.
Since the advent of unlimited tariffs, operators have struggled with users who use one SIM card as a gateway to “distribute the Internet” to many consumers. An important role is played by the fact that in large cities 3G and LTE networks reach their saturation, and the construction of 5G networks has not even begun yet . At the same time, providing mobile access to the Network is more costly for operators than their classical sphere - the provision of voice services.
Based on the words of the general director of VimpelCom, in the coming months we can expect the elimination of unlimited mobile Internet tariff plans from other major cellular operators in the Russian Federation.