Bharti Airtel, India's largest telecom operator, has introduced a program called Airtel Night, which gives 50% data as cashback to those surfing using Airtel mobile connections at night (Hat tip: Sanjay Bafna). What's important here is that it illustrates that there are options for providing cheaper Internet access that are neutral in nature, and Airtel has chosen that route, instead of something like Airtel Zero, which it had launched in April this year, and violated Net Neutrality. Some notes: 1. How does it the night cashback program work? Those who use Airtel data connections at night, between midnight and 6 am, will get 50% of data used as cashback, which can be used during the daytime the next day. So far it is available only for prepaid subscribers, and for those who have a valid data pack. The data is credited back to the MSISDN of the user (2G or 3G or 4G from a data pack). Users will receive an SMS every morning (post 0600 hours) with the amount of data cashback that is being credited to their account. The data received as cashback will have the same validity as the user's active data pack. 2. How does Airtel benefit from this? This essentially allows Airtel to use up unutilized bandwidth capacity at night, when usage is low. Remember that traditionally, ISPs in India also tried to increase Internet usage at night, by offering cheaper night only plans and/or 50% off on utilization of data limits, if usage was at night. Of course,…
