DiGi rolls out ‘smart’ plan

DIGI.COM Bhd, the country's third largest mobile operator, launched the DG Prepaid Smart Plan - a new plan to tap on the increasing base of smartphone users.

DiGi's smartphone user base has been increasing significantly over the past year. Today, more than 2.17 million or 22 per cent of DiGi's total subscriber base are using smart phones. In contrast, smartphone user base represents only about 1.3 million users or 15 per cent of its total customer base a year ago.

"Industry analysts are expecting the smartphone user base to represent more than 50 per cent of total mobile user base by 2016. We at DiGi believe that our smartphone take up rate will be either in line, if not move faster than the industry" said Praveen Rajan, head of Internet and services, at the launch here yesterday.

"It all depends on how fast prices of smartphone can come down."

The DG Prepaid Smart Plan start pack is available at RM25. It comes with 100 Megabits (MB) of data, 30 minutes of voice call (30 second block), 30 text messages and 30 Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS).

Users under the plan can also reload in denominations of RM10, RM30, RM50 and RM100. RM10 gives customers 100 MB of data, 20 minutes of voice calls, 20 text messages, 30 MMS and has a validity period of four days.

Reloading RM30 would give users 300MB, 60 minutes, 60 text messages, 60 MMS and over two weeks of validity.

Customers who reload RM50 will get RM500MB of data, 100 minutes of voice calls, 100 text messages and 100 MMS while those who reloads RM100 gets 1,500 MB of data, 150 minutes, 150 text messages and 150 MMS. Both the RM50 and RM100 reloads have a 30 days validity period.

DiGi said the plan gives customers four times more value in terms of data, voice, text messages and MMS combined.

The plan also allows customers to carry forward unused data, minutes, text messages and MMS, with the cap at 2,000 MB, 300 minutes, 300 text messages and 200 MMS.

However, for existing DiGi customers who want to migrate to this new plan, they may want to wait for few months, as presently they can not retain their existing prepaid numbers when signing up for the new plan.
Praveen said that the telco will be constantly monitoring end user behaviour and will tweak the composition of the voice minutes, amount of text messages and MMS if the need arises.

"As far as the MMS is concerned, we see there is an increasing volume of MMS. I think it's partly because sometimes users do not realise that the photos or pictures were sent via MMS. That's why we are putting this in the plan," he explained.

By Goh Thean Eu, btimes.com.my