For the lower income groups, whether working or students, if your monthly budget is RM10 then you either survive on 10 active days per month or you blow most of your credit on buying validity (example, DG's RM8 for 30 days. A more equitable system would give 30 days validity whether you top up RM10 or RM30.

For those that can afford to commit to more monthly spend, the problem really lies in how complicated prepaid plans have become.

In the old school days when all we did was call and text, it was:

top up > use

Nowadays, the process is:

top up > buy a data and/or minutes subscription > use

Then you have two expiry dates to juggle, the credit expiry and the bundle expiry/renewal date. And those two dates come into conflict, giving rise to unnecessary complication and often unfairness.

So, it might be better if top up buys quota rather than time and credit. Then we are back to a simpler process of top up > use. And if we must have validity, and on a purely quota-based system I do not see the need, please let us have one date only.

Still on validity, the telcos blame their prepaid billing platform which is a huge investment and only changed every 10 years or so. I think what really needs to change is their business model and stop relying on this RM1/day top up to stay active model, which is well passed its use-by date.

And as today's poor student becomes tomorrow's successful business man, so the telco will benefit at the end of the day.

Some will say, oh just switch to postpaid... but prepaid has many benefits for both users and telcos. Long live prepaid. Only survival needs change and telcos need to get back their innovative spirit instead of just constantly tinkering with their same old plans.

This post has been edited by dgboy: Nov 17 2016, 09:41 PM

This could be done by attaching a credit card. If your prepaid in credit, then your credit deducted... otherwise either your usage charged to credit card or an auto top up occurs that is charged to the card. The maximum credit card spend per month can be set by the user.

normally, payu expensive but bundles with expiry cheap..

light user pay more, regular or heavy user pay less

multiply by the usage, it balances out

That is why TS wrote:

It does not mean you can keep your number forever and never use it. There would need to be a minimum usage or top up requirement, otherwise line will be terminated/barred as usual.

I think the pricing can remain the same, subject to market forces. The point being emphasized is the convenience of usage.

For those that top up regularly, validity has not much relevance and their usage and spend gonna remain. Same those foreign workers calling home, I doubt they even look at their credit expiry date.

Whereas for those who cannot commit RM30 per month, there is more convenience and fairness.

There are plenty of committed Malaysian prepaid users. I never used anything else. For example, DG got 9 million prepaid customer, definitely not all foreign worker.

Still, we hope you would support our quest for lifetime validity... the first ever 4-dimensional prepaid plan.

not many telco charging ppu for data these days

most either block data access once your quota is exhausted (they want you to buy booster/data top up), or else allow to fall back on free basic data, which is equivalent to speed throttling

however, having two expiry dates to juggle - one for your credit and another for your data subscription - is a complication we could do without

big telco blame their billing platform for that, yet reality they are living in an old school thinking where topping up RM1/day to keep a prepaid number active is a form of line rental

which postpaid plan still have line rental rather than just buying monthly quotas?