There was a time when getting more data meant paying less.
That sounds almost ridiculous now.
India went through a telecom revolution where data became so cheap that people started watching videos, making calls and staying online all day without thinking twice about how much it was costing them. Jio's entry in 2016 pushed the entire industry into a brutal price war. Airtel fought back. Vodafone and Idea tried to survive. Consumers, for once, were the big winners.
Nearly a decade later, the story looks very different.
Today, Reliance Jio and Bharti Airtel together account for more than 77% of India's mobile subscribers, according to the latest figures from the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India. Jio has 39.29% and Airtel 38.01%. Vodafone Idea is at 15.46% and BSNL at 7.23%.
Airtel isn't a monopoly. Neither is Jio.
But for a country of more than a billion people, having two companies controlling more than three-quarters of the mobile market should at least make regulators and consumers uncomfortable.
Because when competition disappears, the customer usually ends up paying for it.
And Indians are already paying more.
Remember when ₹299 was enough?
Airtel has been steadily pushing customers towards more expensive plans.
One recent example was the removal of its ₹299 prepaid plan. Reports said Airtel discontinued several lower-priced plans as part of an effort to simplify its portfolio and push customers towards higher-value offerings.
For someone earning a comfortable salary, another ₹50 or ₹100 a month might not sound like much.
For a student, a pensioner, a delivery worker, a domestic worker or a family maintaining multiple phone connections, it adds up.
And unlike many other purchases, you can't simply decide not to have a mobile connection.
Your phone number is linked to your bank account. Your UPI account. Your Aadhaar-related services. Your workplace. Your school. Your deliveries. Your OTPs.
Mobile connectivity has effectively become a utility.
Yet telecom companies are still largely free to decide what that utility should cost.
Airtel has been open about what it wants. The company is pursuing what analysts call “premiumisation” — getting customers to spend more and increasing average revenue per user.
From a business perspective, that's completely understandable.
From the customer's perspective, though, it means the same old SIM card is becoming increasingly expensive to keep alive.
The word “unlimited” has started to mean something very different
Then there is Airtel's “Unlimited 5G”.
The word is right there in the marketing.
Unlimited.
But Airtel's own terms say that usage above 300 GB in 30 days can be treated as “commercial usage”, and the company reserves the right to throttle or suspend the service under the applicable conditions.
To be fair, the condition isn't necessarily hidden. It exists in the terms.
So calling this a scam would be irresponsible.
But it is fair to ask why a service marketed as unlimited needs a 300 GB threshold in the first place — and whether an ordinary customer would understand that limitation before buying the plan.
This isn't a new criticism of Airtel either.
The Advertising Standards Council of India has, over the years, upheld complaints against Airtel advertisements involving claims around “unlimited” services, free data and promotional offers where important conditions were considered unclear, ambiguous or insufficiently prominent.
That history doesn't prove that every Airtel advertisement is misleading.
It does, however, make the company's headline claims worth looking at a little more carefully.
And if you spend any time on Indian telecom forums, you'll find plenty of customers who say they discovered restrictions only after buying a plan.
Those are allegations from individual consumers, not proof of a company-wide policy to deceive people.
But the sheer familiarity of the complaint is telling.
The problem isn't just Airtel. It's the market around Airtel.
This is the part that often gets lost in the shouting.
Airtel is not solely responsible for India's telecom market becoming concentrated.
The industry went through years of consolidation. Several operators disappeared, merged or became financially weakened.
Jio's arrival was spectacularly good for consumers in one sense: it forced everyone to slash prices.
But it also changed the competitive landscape permanently.
Today, Airtel and Jio are the two giants.
Vi is much smaller and has struggled financially. BSNL remains an important public-sector player but is nowhere near the scale of the two private leaders.
So when Airtel raises prices, the question isn't simply whether another company exists.
The real question is whether there is enough competition to stop both dominant companies from moving the market in the same direction.
And that's where things get uncomfortable.
The 2024 price hikes showed just how little consumers can do
In July 2024, Jio, Airtel and Vodafone Idea all raised mobile tariffs.
Airtel's increases were substantial, with some plans becoming around 10–20% more expensive.
The companies had their reasons. Indian telecom operators had spent years complaining that tariffs were too low to support healthy returns and the enormous investment required for 5G and network expansion.
That argument isn't unreasonable.
Networks aren't free.
But consumers were left with a fairly unpleasant choice: pay more or switch.
And switching isn't always easy.
Maybe Airtel works better at your home.
Maybe Jio works better at your office.
Maybe your entire family uses the same network.
Maybe your bank and other services are tied to a number you've had for 15 years.
Maybe the alternative simply isn't good enough where you live.
Technically, you have a choice.
Practically, you may not have much of one.
That's an important distinction.
And this isn't the first time Airtel has been accused of playing hardball
One of the most serious examples goes back to 2016, when Jio was entering the market.
TRAI found that Airtel, along with Vodafone India and Idea Cellular, had failed to provide adequate Points of Interconnection to Jio.
The regulator described the conduct as a violation of licence conditions and said the behaviour appeared aimed at stifling competition.
That's a much more serious allegation than an angry Reddit post.
It came from the telecom regulator.
Airtel and the other operators disputed the allegations and there was a larger fight over network interconnection, call quality and Jio's aggressive entry into the market.
The episode is worth remembering because it shows something important: the telecom industry has always been a fight over more than prices.
It is a fight over access, infrastructure, customers and, ultimately, market power.
What about the government?
This is perhaps the most frustrating part for consumers.
When your recharge goes up, it is easy to ask why the government isn't simply stopping it.
The answer is that it generally doesn't set telecom prices.
India follows a tariff-forbearance approach. Operators have considerable freedom to set tariffs, within the regulatory framework.
The idea is that competition should protect consumers rather than the government fixing every price.
That's a reasonable philosophy — provided the competition is strong enough.
And that's exactly what deserves scrutiny now.
If there were ten serious telecom operators competing for your business, a company raising prices too aggressively would risk losing customers.
If there are effectively two dominant private operators, the pressure is different.
The government doesn't necessarily need to tell Airtel what its ₹349 plan should cost.
It needs to make sure that consumers have real alternatives.
That means making it easier for smaller operators to compete, ensuring spectrum and infrastructure policies don't unnecessarily favour incumbents, enforcing transparent pricing and taking misleading claims seriously.
It also means looking much more closely at the way telecom companies design their plans.
Because “fine print” isn't the same thing as informed choice
This is where the discussion around dark patterns becomes interesting.
The term is often thrown around far too casually.
A confusing recharge screen isn't automatically a dark pattern. A company putting conditions in its terms isn't automatically committing fraud.
But consumer protection isn't only about whether something is technically disclosed.
It's also about whether the customer can reasonably understand what they're buying.
If the giant text says “UNLIMITED 5G” and the important qualification is somewhere much less prominent, consumers can reasonably feel misled even if the legal terms technically contain the answer.
Airtel's prepaid terms also contain provisions under which, in certain circumstances, available main balance can be used toward a minimum combo voucher after a plan expires.
Again, that's in the terms.
But ask an ordinary prepaid customer whether they expect money sitting in their account to be automatically converted into another pack, and the answer might be very different.
These are precisely the kinds of practices that deserve regulatory attention.
Not because every one of them is illegal.
Because consumer choice should mean more than technically having a 30-page document somewhere explaining the rules.
Indians aren't asking telecom companies to run charities
This is worth saying.
Airtel is a business.
It is not the government's job to force Airtel to sell mobile data at a loss.
Companies need to make money. They need to invest in infrastructure. They need to pay employees. They need to buy spectrum and maintain networks.
Nobody should seriously argue otherwise.
But there is a difference between a company making a reasonable return and a market becoming so concentrated that consumers have little leverage.
That's why the Airtel debate shouldn't really be about whether Airtel is “evil”.
It should be about whether India's telecom market is still competitive enough.
The uncomfortable truth
The telecom revolution gave Indians incredibly cheap data.
Now the companies that survived that revolution want to make more money from those same customers.
That's normal capitalism.
The uncomfortable part is that telecom isn't just another consumer product anymore.
You can stop buying a particular biscuit.
You can cancel a streaming subscription.
You can skip a restaurant.
But try going without a phone number in 2026.
For most Indians, that's not really an option.
So when Airtel raises the price of keeping that number active, the consumer isn't making a completely free choice. They're paying for something that modern life increasingly requires.
That is why the government's job cannot simply be to say, “There are other operators. Switch.”
There need to be enough genuinely competitive alternatives for that choice to mean something.
Airtel isn't a monopoly.
But when Airtel and Jio control more than three-quarters of the market, the question of whether India's telecom sector has become too concentrated is no longer an anti-Airtel rant.
It is a legitimate policy question.
And perhaps it's time regulators started asking it a little more loudly.
Because India's telecom revolution was supposed to give consumers more power. It shouldn't end with consumers having fewer choices and higher bills.