More free SMS, this time from Virgin Mobile - is this really a good idea?

Virgin Mobile is now providing 200 free SMS every day to its Indian customers. Users in India don’t need to buy a new package or incur any extra monthly cost, they just need to send a small number of SMS during the day to access to new service.

The free SMS are split between national and local texts, with 100 free texts given for each type. To gain the free texts, a user just has to send three texts of each type. So once a Virgin customer has sent and paid for a total of six text messages, they get another 200 free.

From the release:

M. A. Madhusudan, Chief Executive Officer, Virgin Mobile, India, says “Our research states that youngsters are looking for solutions that provide them the flexibility to use mobile services as per their need. They use SMS as an important device to live a life of their choice, zoning people in and out from their world. Due to voice text pricing, sending SMSs are costly. Now with our new free SMS offer we believe that youth will take the benefit of this medium in a big way.”

What we think?

This is the second free SMS story we’ve had today. But where Anam is offering texts to mobile operators, Virgin Mobile is giving them to customers. The question that begs to be answered is why?

SMS is one of the only services that has been getting steadily stronger during the recession. Is sacrificing the biggest mobile data revenue stream really the way forward? Why give SMS away when people have proven they’re happy to pay for them?

I’m a big fan of improving QoS for users, but this trend doesn’t help improve the mobile space at all. All it does is drain income from one of the few reliable revenue sources that exists at the moment. When certain aspects of the mobile Internet are crying out for funding and infrastructure, I really don’t get why money is being refused like this.