Recharge and top up are two phrases that are frequently heard these days. These are ways to replenish a prepaid mobile account. All over the world, an overwhelming majority of connections in mobile telephony are prepaid and this may be due to the fact that people like to be aware of their expenditure in a given period of time. Those who have prepaid accounts need to either top up or recharge their prepaid mobile accounts once they have exhausted all money in their account and need to make a call. There are people who think that recharge and top up are same things, and even use them interchangeably. Though, this might be true today, the situation was different not too long ago when top up and recharge were two different concepts. Let us take a closer look.
Till about two years ago, prepaid mobile connections had limited validity, and one carried forward validity recharging the account with special vouchers that cost huge amounts and provided small talk times. One had to buy the SIM of a service provider and then buy a voucher to get a validity of 6 months or 1 year. It was natural for the voucher providing a longer validity to be costlier than the voucher that provided a validity of 6 months. Otherwise, with smaller recharge coupons, one got a validity of one month only. Even smallest vouchers with a month’s validity was a costly affair for a poor person. All this meant that to be able to make and receive a call, one needed to keep on extending validity with all sorts of vouchers. There was another catch with these validity vouchers. Suppose one bought a validity of 1 month with the smallest voucher that gave a small talk time that did not last for more than 15 days. Now the person had a validity of 15 more days, but had zero balance in his prepaid account. The only option available for the person was to get a top up, which did not alter the validity; that stood at where it was. These small value top ups meant a person could carry till his validity getting the account top upped any number of times he so desired.
But the concept of top up, which was so loved by people at that time, got a thud when service providers came up with the idea of life long SIM card of prepaid accounts. Now SIM card holders have validity of a life time (which was not exactly a life time but a validity of more than 10 years nevertheless). It meant that there was no fear of losing the number if there was no balance in the account of a person, and he could add any amount to his credit whenever he so desired rather than thinking about validity all the time earlier.
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What is the difference between Recharge and Top Up? • Both top up and recharge allowed a person to replenish his prepaid mobile account that allowed him to make a call • Recharge vouchers were of higher denominations than top up cards • Recharge vouchers provided one with a validity of one or more months. • There were special recharge vouchers that provided extended validity of an year, but these vouchers had very small talk values. • It was easy for one to find no balance in account with recharge cards that provided validity. • This is where top up card came handy as it provided talk time without affecting rest of validity.
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