Former Vodafone India SVP (Innovation & Business Development) Jonathan Bill and former OnMobile CEO Arvind Rao have launched a tariff plan comparison & recommendation service called BillBachao. It is currently available on Android and web, although the focus is on Android (and iOS app that is coming out next week) since the site seems to offer lesser features than the app. The app tracks the consumer's mobile usage (call minutes, text messages & data) over a period of time to recommend better tariff plans from the same operator or a different operator. What's particularly interesting though is that it also provides operator recommendations to users based on signal quality & speed at their home & office location. Speaking with Medianama, Bill said that these network recommendations are provided by tracking the user's overall network experience over a period of time along with crowdsourced anonymised network data from users around their location and user ratings for the operator in that location. It also takes user's overall travel profile to provide these recommendations. Bill claims that they have already collected over 0.5 million network data points from these sources until now. We tried the app and noticed that it track various network parameters like average signal strength, network blackout time and number of weak signal calls over three days to suggest a better network. The app screenshots suggests that it also tracks the network fluctuations between 3G and 2G networks along with data speeds for providing these recommendations. Tariff recommendations Based on their mobile usage, the app allows users to browse through tariffs that…
