Review of tariff plans suitable for children and their parents. Beeline tariff “First for children”

When choosing tariffs for children, you need to focus on many factors. It all depends on how actively children use their mobile phones. In many cases, you can get by with a simple tariff plan without a subscription fee. Other children need mobile Internet. Also, in children's tariffs there are interesting things regarding their safety - we will talk about all this as part of this review.

How to choose a tariff for a child

In this material we will look at three categories of tariffs for children:

• Specialized tariff plans - they are created specifically for children and contain blocking and useful options.
• Offers without a monthly fee - they are focused on calls.
• Tariff plans for active children - with Internet and call packages.

The first category is suitable for parents who especially care about the younger generation. This includes offers with limited services or GPS tracking of children. In recent years, they have almost disappeared, so this functionality is created by additional options.

The second category includes tariff plans without mandatory monthly payments. The child’s task is to call his parents after school or before school (they say, he got there, everything is fine). An excellent solution for an early age, when mobile Internet on the phone is overkill. In the third category there are traditional package offers with traffic, minutes and messages - for the child’s active communication with parents, relatives and peers.

Specialized rates

Let's open this category with an interesting offer from MTS for smart watches - the ones that can track their location and transmit coordinate data via the Internet. Use the “Smart Device” tariff for these purposes. The subscription fee for the first year will be 670 rubles, then 80 rubles monthly. Monthly content – ​​300 MB of traffic, 30 minutes for calls and 30 SMS. We insert the SIM card into the smartwatch - the child can go to school or for a walk. And since calling from a smartwatch is inconvenient, we install a SIM card with a tariff from the following categories in the mobile phone.

MegaFon does not have special tariffs for children. But there is such an interesting thing as parental control. It is implemented within the framework of the option of the same name. It allows you to control the battery on your smartphone, the resources you visit, and some settings. If you constantly wonder where is my child and why doesn’t he answer the phone, choose any tariff and connect the “Parental Control” option to it.

Beeline does not have children's tariffs, but it does have a Signal tariff plan. Children will be supervised if you buy them a watch with GPS tracking and install a SIM card with this tariff plan in it. The subscription fee is 1 rub/day, the cost of traffic is 2 rub/MB. Traffic consumption in hours is extremely small, so monthly payments will be small. As for Tele2, we did not find any suitable options for children.

Tariffs without monthly fee

The Beeline operator will offer us “Zero doubts” and “Per-second” tariffs. “Zero Doubt” provides inexpensive local calls with a per-minute tariff of 2 rubles/min. “Per-second” could be more profitable, but here the cost of a full minute is 3 rubles. This is beneficial for short conversations, but not so much for long ones.

A favorable tariff from MegaFon, without a subscription fee - this is “Switch to ZERO”. Tariffing here is a little confusing - the cost of calls to numbers of other operators is 6 rubles for a package of 5 minutes. On-network unlimited is activated after the first call per day and costs 6 rubles. If you don't use it, it turns off at the end of the current day. We recommend that you monitor your child’s balance yourself.

Due to the active development of both mobile and wired Internet, the number of users under the age of majority is increasing every year. However, given that there is a lot of obscene content on the Internet, parents have a serious problem - to protect their children from the influence of information that can cause psychological trauma or in any other way influence the deviation from the normal development of the child. Telecom operators are certainly answering this challenge. For example, the other day MTS introduced a new corresponding option for its mobile subscribers. Let's see what the market generally offers on this issue.

Let's turn to the leading players in the telecommunications market, such as, "" and "", who are already offering specialized tariff plans to protect children from inappropriate content. We would like to separately note the company, which does not offer such options at all.

This review deals with all sorts of restrictions imposed on tariffs or tariff options, by resorting to which the adult part of users can limit the access of their offspring to unwanted content. In particular, this includes: filtering search queries, barring calls to short numbers, as well as sending SMS messages to them. At the same time, parents have the opportunity to remotely monitor not only the current state of the child’s personal account, but often also the location of their child.

Let's consider and compare all the opportunities presented by cellular operators, to what extent they suit the needs of parents. Naturally, the cost of such services also plays an important role.

Safe Internet for children from MTS

MTS is ready to provide a special “Children's package” option (it appeared the other day), which will protect the child from unnecessary information, as well as find out his location.

It is worth noting that the above service controls more than 80 categories of dangerous Internet content, sending/receiving paid SMS and MMS from short numbers, as well as calls to them. If the balance approaches zero, parents instantly receive an SMS notification about this. In order to find out the true location of the child, you need to send a free SMS request from your mobile device to the toll-free number 1112.

Here’s how Vasil Latsanich, vice president of the MTS group for marketing, spoke about the new service: “Mobile technologies and the Internet open up a huge number of new opportunities for children for study and entertainment, but fraudulent paid services and adult content pose a certain danger for an unprepared user. MTS offers a universal solution that will allow young subscribers to enjoy modern gadgets and communications, protecting them from network threats and unexpected expenses, and for parents to track their child’s location in order to protect them from dangerous situations in real life.”

Protection of children from obscene content offered by MTS

Connecting/disabling the MTS “Children's package” option (more detailed information can be found on the operator’s official website http://www.mts.ru/mob_connect/tariffs/discounts/discounts_with_mts/detskiy_paket/) costs absolutely nothing. However, there is a monthly subscription fee of 80 rubles, which will be debited from the child’s personal account. In order to activate the service, you need to dial the combination *111*1112# from your child’s phone.

If parents foresee a situation in which the child can independently disable the option, in order to avoid parental control, it is necessary to submit a corresponding application to any MTS cellular communication store.

In addition to the “Children's Package” option, MTS provides the “Parental Control” service (more detailed information can be found on the operator’s official website http://www.mts.ru/mobil_inet_and_tv/internet_comp/additionally_services/parent_control/), which allows you to protect children from inappropriate behavior. content available via mobile or home Internet.

It is also worth noting that MTS constantly holds educational exhibitions and lessons on useful and safe Internet, with the support of the Ministry of Telecom and Mass Communications of the Russian Federation, the Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation, as well as employees of the Faculty of Psychology of M.V. Lomonosov Moscow State University and the Internet Development Foundation. Children are introduced to the basic rules for the safe use of Internet resources and the corresponding responsibility for committing certain acts.

Safe Internet for children from MegaFon

The MegaFon company provides its subscribers with two packages of services aimed at protecting children from unnecessary information. In this case we are talking about the “Be Calm” and “Children’s Internet” options.

The first option will not allow the child to access dubious sites via a 3G modem or from a SIM card inserted into a mobile device. According to the “Be Calm” package, spontaneous opening of Internet windows will be prohibited and protection against spyware/virus attacks will be provided.

Information security is carried out through the Parental Control service included in the package, which works on the principle of a filter, preventing access to Internet pages with inappropriate content.

Protection of children from obscene content offered by MegaFon

In addition, the “Be Calm” package will not allow you to send paid SMS messages to short numbers, as well as make calls to them thanks to the included “Stop Content” service (more detailed information can be found on the operator’s website http://moscow.megafon.ru /services/content/stop_content/about.html), which is provided without any usage fees.

And thanks to the “Balance of Loved Ones” service, also included in the package, it becomes possible to obtain information about the state of affairs of the child’s personal account. It, like other services, is provided completely free of charge.

In order to control the location, the MegaFon company provides the “Beacon” option (more detailed information can be found on the operator’s website http://moscow.megafon.ru/services/searchandnavi/mayachok.html#porting). Right on the screen of your mobile device, you can see your child’s location on a map at any time. Just like the rest of the options, “Beacon” is completely free. To activate the service, you need to dial the command *141*child number#call. After this, an MMS message about the location is received.

As a result, we can come to the conclusion that the “Be Calm” option does not require any financial resources and allows you to protect your child from dangerous information and control his location.

It is worth noting that there is a “Children’s Internet” tariff plan (more detailed information can be found on the operator’s official website http://moscow.megafon.ru/internet/mobile_internet_services/for_parents_children/detskiy_internet.html#price). It already includes the ability to control the information flows described above and provides unlimited access to the Internet via mobile devices. You can activate the tariff absolutely free by dialing *552#call on your phone. However, Children's Internet provides a subscription fee of 300 rubles per month.

Safe Internet for children from Beeline

Unfortunately, the Beeline company cannot boast of a long list of proposals in terms of child protection. However, along with this, this player has the “Parental Control” option (more detailed information on the operator’s website http://internet.beeline.ru/provod/msk/service/index.wbp), which applies to the home Internet.

Through this service, parents have the opportunity to restrict their child from obscene content distributed on the Internet, as well as from prolonged exposure to the World Wide Web. It is worth noting that the “Parental Controls” option is at the testing stage.

Protection of children from obscene content offered by Beeline

In order to activate the service, you need to log into your personal account and perform certain actions indicated on the operator’s website.

Proposals of mobile operators to ensure safe Internet access for children - main conclusions:

As a result of the review of services that provide restriction of children’s access to inappropriate content, we can summarize:

MTS provides a completely adequate option that prevents children from accessing inappropriate information and allows you to control the child’s personal account and location. The cost of the service is 80 rubles per month.

The MegaFon company provides very interesting options, similar to those distributed by the mobile operator MTS, but completely free.

The Beeline company provides the Parental Control service, however, only within the home Internet.

Tele2 cannot provide anything like this yet.

A mobile phone for a child today is a necessity, although many children strive to turn it into an exciting interactive toy. The Beeline children's tariff will help parents not to spend too much to top up their child's account, and at the same time he will always stay in touch. Beeline tariffs are great for adults, and now there is the first children's tariff.

What to expect from the tariff

The children's tariff is affordable and lacks unnecessary services. The main advantage is that even with a negative balance, the child will be able to call his parents. Moreover, you can go into a negative balance up to 60 rubles.

The peculiarity of “Children’s” is that for every minute of an incoming call, 30 kopecks are deducted to the account; the maximum earnings per day are 5.1 rubles. These positive aspects make parents happy. But the following conditions also apply:

1. Outgoing calls – 3.75 minutes.
2. Ability to connect your favorite numbers. Moreover, calls to them will be charged: 1.88 for the first minute and 1 ruble for the following minutes.
3. SMS - 9.95 rubles, second and subsequent ones - 10 kopecks each.
4. Beeline Internet – 9.95 rubles/MB, if you don’t connect to more profitable services.

Looking at the conditions, it becomes clear that such a tariff is not the most profitable, so it quickly became archival. Those who connected earlier can still use it.

Rates that may be suitable for children

The official Beeline website offers the “All 1” or “All 1” tariff. The latter does not work in all regions. Under the terms of the specified tariffs, the child will have Internet traffic of up to 4 GB within 200-400 minutes for calls. “Everything 1” has an SMS package.

It is also worth considering a tariff without a monthly fee; in many regions there are 2:

• "Zero doubts." Call minutes are charged from 1.2-1.5 rubles per minute depending on the region. The package does not include the Internet, the SMS package, but they can be connected separately at a favorable price.
• "Second". Billing is per second, the cost also depends on the region, varies between 2-5 kopecks per second.

In these tariffs you need to monitor the balance, since there is no possibility of going into the negative. As an option, you can activate the automatic “Trust payment” service.

Conclusion

Tariffs for children are not difficult to choose; you can even register a Beeline personal account for a minor’s number, which will help the child keep his expenses under control.

The news is a serious update of the well-known Beeline “First Children” tariff. Prior to this, MTS upgraded its no less famous “Cool” tariff, and MegaFon abandoned the “Smesharikov” upgrade and created a new version of the “Ring-Ding” children’s tariff "

Apparently, at this stage there has been a certain balance of offers in this market segment, and it will be interesting to compare the offers of all three operators. And also try again to answer a series of “eternal” questions: what is and should be a special children’s tariff, is this a far-fetched category, and are special tariffs for children necessary in principle?

Lyrics

Attempts to create a special “children’s” phone with easier controls and reduced capabilities have already been and continue to be with varying degrees of success, but the demand for such models is small: tech-savvy kids prefer to see in their phone not just another baby doll, but a full set of all “adult” functions. And if you don’t show off your “children’s” phone to your peers, they will laugh at you. The tariff is simpler; you can layout and redesign it as you like, creating a targeted offer. Let's talk about the specific features of the tariff plan for a child.

• Name. I already wrote about the clearly unfortunate name of the tariff; the lack of imagination in this case served a disgusting service to an otherwise good proposal. Indeed, what teenager or even a child of even the slightest conscious age would want to be connected to a tariff with the humiliating name “Children’s”? With their “Cool” MTS marketers hit the nail on the head, to say the least. Even if it’s not “Children’s”, but “First Children’s”, radish horseradish is not sweeter. The name of the tariff should “catch” and not repel the young subscriber, it seems obvious. MegaFon's unpronounceable “Ring-Ding” is also not a gift, but at least it does not cause obvious rejection. It’s fortunate that the name “Children’s” is not displayed on the display, otherwise the tariff would have been doomed from the moment of its birth.
• Content, damn it. Almost all of us are faced with the same problem: a child is given a phone primarily for his own peace of mind, but the child strives to use it not to communicate with caring parents. Downloading picture melodies, SMS voting for your favorite pop idol, SMS chats/dating, short paid numbers with such tempting “Hot Conversations”, etc. – there are a great many ways to reset your balance in a couple of hours and remain without communication.
• Mobile Internet. A child is an impulsive, enthusiastic and trusting creature. Accordingly, such a subscriber is extremely vulnerable to all sorts of scammers and semi-legal scams. At the same time, it is undesirable to completely deprive a child of mobile Internet: in addition to the natural resentment of “discrimination,” it also means the inability to use popular instant messengers.
• Child's location. Another eternal problem is parental concern about “where is he/she?” Modern mobile positioning technologies make it possible to determine the location of the device with an accuracy of two to three hundred meters (in the city), which is not bad: at least you can understand whether the child is frolicking in a nearby park instead of sitting at a desk. It is logical to hope that in the special “children’s” tariff we will see some special functions for determining the location of the phone.
• Easy access to parents. Ideally, at least a short call to mom/dad should be guaranteed to be possible regardless of the state of the personal account.
• Flexibility and controllability. Ideally, I would like to be able to configure all the additional functionality and decide for myself how, in what and how much to limit the child. Or don't limit it at all. You can still dream about flexible management of the consumption of additional services (some SMS, Wap traffic, etc. per week). Or at least about managing overall expenses. Let’s say, once a given “bar” for daily or weekly money expenditure is reached, all services are turned off, except for voice communication with parents.

The “children’s” proposals of our “Big Three” to a certain extent satisfy the listed requirements, but only partially and with reservations; there is no ideal.

New "First Children's*"

First, let's look at the updates that Beeline pleased us with in its next version of the tariff. The previous tariff update was more than a year and a half ago (an asterisk appeared in the title), you can read our review on this topic. There you can also familiarize yourself with the parameters and characteristics of the tariff in force until March 17, 2011. It is the current one (in the past tense), since the current changes affect not only new connections, but also all existing subscribers of the “First Children” tariff, this is important. Since the new version of the tariff is clearly better, the automatic transfer of all existing subscribers to it should be regarded as a very positive step by the operator. Positive and very unusual, I searched for a long time and unsuccessfully for a catch. So, we read the news published on March 11, quote:

• expansion of the number of favorite numbers from 3 to 5
• increasing the threshold for minus care to 60 rubles.
• increase in the maximum bonus per day for incoming calls to 5.1 rubles.
• reduction in the cost of calls to city local calls to 2 rubles. from the second minute of conversation, the cost of the first minute is 3 rubles.
• reduction of GPRS Internet to 3 rubles.
• reduction of WAP Internet to 3 rubles. for 1 MB.
• change in MMS cost from 3.95 rub. up to 6.60 rubles.”

Changes tabulated and color-coded:

As we can see, the changes are favorable and very much in our favor.

• There is still no subscription fee for “Favorite numbers”, although these numbers have become five instead of three. Existing subscribers will need to reconnect all five “favorite” numbers, including those that were connected previously. Connect using the USSD command *139*885*number*number*number*number*number#, disable the service *139*880#, check - *139*889#.
• The price of calls to landline numbers has been reduced and made equal to the price of calls to mobile phone networks.
• The cost of GPRS traffic has been reduced to 3 rubles/MB (rounded to 100 KB). Moreover, if I understand correctly, the “Carefree Internet” service continues to operate even after the current changes to the tariff are made. Those. To enable unlimited access until the end of the current day, you just need to pay for the first 5 Megabytes of traffic. It turns out to be an attraction of unheard-of generosity, even if limited to 2 gigabytes of traffic per month.
• The inhumane tariffing of Wap-GPRS has been completely cancelled, now the price is the same and is the same 3 rubles/MB, including when accessing through Wap-APN. Naturally, the rounding of Wap traffic will now also be 100 KB.
• More than doubling the maximum possible size of the bonus for incoming calls is an important update and a good incentive to talk with your beloved child longer and more often. True, we should not forget about the second-by-second accumulation of the bonus: “A bonus of 30 kopecks including VAT is awarded for a full minute of incoming calls received on the “home” network and can be used to pay for Beeline services, with the exception of roaming services, as well as calls to short paid numbers of infotainment services and SMS to short paid numbers of infotainment services. The duration of incoming calls is summarized second by second throughout the day. The bonus is credited to your account in real time.”
• Finally, the price of MMS messages has increased. It is unlikely that it was “malicious”; rather, they brought the cost of MMS to a single price. In general, not critical. Although, taking into account the “national popularity” of this service, in order to achieve harmony, it would be more logical to reduce the price of an MMS message to at least 3.95 rubles. on all other tariffs instead of increasing the price on First Children's.

Comparison

Let’s summarize the main parameters of competing “children’s” tariffs in a general table. Prices, as usual, are in rubles including VAT.

* From the second minute of conversation
** Unlimited access to the special “Children’s Portal” for 100 rubles. per month
*** 50 rubles/month for three identified numbers, a monthly fee is charged from the location determining ("Child under supervision" service).

As you can see, as a result of the current upgrade of First Children's, all three tariffs turned out to be quite close in their parameters. The "O" Hard tariff instead of the "Ring-Ding" would have looked noticeably more advantageous, but the "Ring-Ding" has added a free service for determining the location of the child ("Beacon"), which, in relation to the children's tariff, fully compensates for the slightly higher prices. If you determine location is not required, it is more advisable to select “O”Hard. Fortunately, the time has passed when the children's tariff was purchased only for the “Content Blocking” service; now operators allow you to block content SMS and calls to paid short numbers on most tariffs. Despite the approximate price parity, each of the three tariff plans has its own “highlights” that can seriously affect the choice:

• In “First Children's*” (Beeline) there is a bonus for incoming calls and the ability to go into the minus up to the level of -60 rubles. on balance. But there is no child location service.
• In the Ring-Ding tariff (MegaFon), five “Favorite numbers” can be any local, including MGTS fixed numbers. Also included in this tariff is free determination of the child’s location. But calls to MGTS phones are relatively expensive.
• “Cool” (MTS) provides unlimited calls to two “Favorite numbers” for a monthly fee of 90 rubles/month. But there is no full-fledged mobile Internet (only the “Children’s Portal” for 100 rubles/month) and for determining the location of children (up to three individuals) they charge a subscription fee of 50 rubles/month.

Summary

The new “First Children's*” no longer feels like a “black sheep” in a flock of competitors; the tariff turned out to be very good. Five “Favorite Numbers” without a monthly fee, even if strictly within the network, is a significant plus; mobile Internet at 3 rubles/MB on a voice tariff is also valuable. In the absence of a noticeable imbalance between outgoing and incoming calls, thanks to the bonus for incoming calls, a minute of outgoing call will cost on average 0.2 rubles. cheaper. It is quite suitable as a universal tariff not only for a child.