Bharti Airtel has discontinued several prepaid plans priced in a selective tariff move aimed at simplifying its pricing architecture and improving average revenue per user (ARPU). The biggest impact is at the Rs 299 price point. Airtel has discontinued the plan, which offered 1.5GB of daily data for 28 days. The next available option is the Rs 349 plan, effectively raising the price by 16%.

Airtel is pushing for a fundamental change in telecom pricing, with higher-data-using customers paying more rather than operators relying primarily on broad-based tariff hikes.

Bharti Airtel Executive Vice-Chairman Gopal Vittal had flagged the need for a change in pricing architecture during the company’s Q1FY27 earnings call last month. A response sought from Airtel remained unanswered at the time of publication.

“The most important thing is to repair the pricing architecture,” Vittal said, arguing that offering unlimited data at very low price points effectively caps ARPU and is not sustainable for telecom operators.

As India becomes more affluent and customers migrate to larger data plans, a more sensible pricing structure could drive sustained ARPU growth over the next five to seven years without necessarily increasing entry-level prices, he said.

Vittal said, “The way that we really need to think about price architecture as an industry needs to fundamentally change over the next few years”.