Everyone has been raving about the fact that how WhatsApp might eat away traditional calling companies but truth be told, there's more to its calling feature than what most people had first presumed. While telcos in India have been hounding the telecom ministry to regulate services like WhatsApp, Skype etc. common users believe that options like WhatsApp calling will reduce their monthly phone bills to some extent.
However things might not be that simple after all and according to latest reports, it might put your phone bills at major risk of going above what you have been getting all this while, before WhatsApp decided to offer its own calling functionality.
The feature got first rolled out to Android and the same was later added to iOS for iPhone and by call-per-data estimation, the figures might be the jumping above what many expected to be the end to telcos monopoly.
As highlighted by an ANI report, testing the app has resulted in data figure that ends up costing you much more than a normal voice call. With one call, users are showing data usage high as high 1.3 MB for a minutes call via WhatsApp.
Churning out more data numbers, it is easy conclude with the prospect of users eating up their 500MB data plan in less than 6 hours, which is quite a hefty charge for calling, and this might get everyone to sit up and realise maybe WhatsApp calling isn't the most cost-saving option after all.
Will this development finally end the debate between consumer-telcos and internet crusaders who have backed the likes of WhatsApp to continue without major telecom regulations in place? All we can say is, revelations like these will serve up telcos and strengthen their case further.
