Free roaming option for mobile users The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) today allowed free mobile roaming on payment of a fixed fee from July 1 and reduced the national roaming charges for others by up to 57 per cent.Trai, however, said making national roaming completely free was not practical at the moment.“The authority has decided to reduce the ceiling (upper price for roaming calls and SMS rates) across board, permitting telecom providers to issue special tariff vouchers and mandating that a roaming plan will be offered (for post paid customers),” Trai chairman Rahul Khullar told reporters here.In 2007, Trai had fixed the ceilings on roaming charges at Rs 1.40 per minute for outgoing local calls and Rs 2.40 per minute for outgoing STD calls.These ceilings have been reduced to Re 1 per minute for outgoing local calls and Rs 1.50 per minute for outgoing STD calls. Similarly, the ceiling for incoming calls while on national roaming has been reduced to 75 paise per minute from Rs 1.75 per minute.Khullar said operators had been mandated to provide two types of roaming plan for customers.“In one case, charges on incoming will be free but a fixed charge will be levied and in the other regime you don’t give free incoming and there will be no fixed charges. The philosophy of the authority is let the customers decide what they want. Competition in the market will help in driving tariffs down,” he said.The new plans will be among the 25 tariff schemes that a company is allowed to offer to its customers.“The idea of free roaming is that the roaming tariff should be equal to home tariff (when customer is not roaming). The point we want to make is fully free roaming ... is not practical,” he said. Telecom minister Kapil Sibal had earlier said free national roaming would be implemented by October.Khullar said the National Telecom Policy 2012 talked about working towards a free roaming regime and not immediate implementation. He also said the regulator would review the regime after a year instead of the current practice of reviewing after three years. " " " " Copyright © 2013 The Telegraph. All rights reserved. Disclaimer | Privacy Policy | Contact Us
Posted on: Wed, 19 Jun 2013 00:16:03 +0000
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