RCS&RDS beats competitors at pricing game

RCS&RDS communications company enters the fixed telephony market more than one year from the deregulation of the domestic communications market, and several months after its rival Astral Telecom.

RCS&RDS on Tuesday released its first fixed local and national telephony services, branded as RDS.TEL, therefore becoming a full communications solutions (voice, data and cable TV) provider for both business and individual users. The RDS.TEL brand was dedicated last May. The company has been providing only international telephony services under this brand so far.

The RDS.TEL fixed telephony services are intended for users located in the service area of the group’s network and allow making local and inter-county calls to destinations both within and outside the network. The company has interconnection agreements in place with the mobile telephony operators and RomTelecom at the moment.

Which actually means calls can only be made to and from users of RDS.TEL services and subscribers of Connex, Orange, Zapp and RomTelecom but not Astral Telecom. RCS&RDS’ fixed telephony services are available in only a few cities for the time being: Bucharest, Arad, Constanta, Timisoara, Oradea, Craiova, Iasi and Sibiu with expansion to five more locations by yearend planned.

RCS&RDS employs an aggressive pricing policy and is operating lower tariffs than its long-time rival Astral Telecom, as well as lower than RomTelecom. RCS&RDS representatives say RDS.TEL’s tariffs are 14% to 48% lower than those of the national public operator. “The pricing policy is not aggressive because we’ve miscalculated, but because we want to attract as many clients as possible. We need to be regarded as a company that operates good tariffs and provides services of a like quality,” Alexandru Oprea, RCS&RDS general manager said.

For instance, an inter-county call within RCS&RDS’ network costs no more than 1.25 eurocents/minute, and one from RDS to RomTelecom costs 4.75 eurocents/minute. Astral Telefix’ inter-county service costs $0.05 within the network and $0.06-$0.07 for calls from Astral to RomTelecom. RomTelecom charges one impulse every fifteen seconds, each impulse priced at 1.67 eurocents. Those that want to subscribe to RCS&RDS telephony services get a national number in the 031 40 xxxxx range in Bucharest and in the 03yy 40 xxxx range for the rest of country (yy is the county prefix) for every line. The telephone itself is provided in exchange for a fee and the price varies by subscription type.
iuliana.cerchez@zf.ro