Despite the response to Monsoon Hungama, the new scheme of Reliance Infocomm, GSM operators are playing it cool. They don't think the rush is of their customers who are exiting on the churn.

Sanjoy Mukerji, chief operating officer of Hutch, says, "We are not afraid of what is happening. Today's subscribers are intelligent. They will check the overall cost and then finally settle on a service provider."

When asked whether Hutch is planning to lower the entry price, Mukerji said, "It is too early to comment. We may watch for another week. As of today, we are observing the developments."

Vijay Grover, chief operating officer of Idea Cellular (Gujarat and Maharashtra), is more confident. He says: "Just wait and watch how many subscribers of this company will stick to its services. May be for a maximum of two months. In these huge queues there are hardly any GSM subscribers shifting to Reliance. These all are new subscribers who wanted a low entry point to go mobile but they all will come back to us after some time."

He also said that Idea is not planning to join the race with Reliance. "They have a different strategy and if a company wants to invest hundreds of crores and write it off, what can we do?"

Meantime, the scheme may have brought smiles to the faces of new subscribers but Reliance's old subscribers are feeling dejected.

Gurinder Lalli, an exporter and Reliance customer since the last four months, was thoroughly disappointed on Friday when he found huge crowd in front of the Vimal showroom on C G Road in Ahmedabad getting new Reliance CDMA mobile connections at as low as Rs 100 as entry charges.

"I am feeling cheated today as I had paid Rs 3,350 to Reliance four months ago to buy the connection and now my friends are getting the same at Rs 100-Rs 500. I am also not happy with the services as there are network problems whenever I travel to the outskirts of the city," said Lalli. He was earlier a subscriber of Airtel and decided to go for Reliance considering the cost.

"Now I feel like going back to Airtel or any other GSM operator but there is no one to whom I can sell off my Samsung CDMA handset because it is available for Rs 100 in the latest scheme," he said.

"It is good to get mobile at Rs 500 and the agents outside are offering it even at Rs 100. I have just bought one in addition to my existing Hutch connection, just to give a trial as I am not investing a lot of money for this new handset and if it does not suit my requirements, I will stop the services," said Ranjit Patel.

Ashok Bansal, who runs a courier business, said, "I will keep one with me and rest for my business partners."

He bought six connections on Thursday. G S Master, a resident of Jamalpur and a freelance photographer, says: "When I had taken a connection at Rs 3,350, it was the lowest and I had opted for it but the company has now changed the entry cost to less than 10 per cent of what I had paid. This is not fair as I have unnecessarily blocked Rs 3,000 in excess with Reliance which I could have used for some other purpose."