After so many missed deadlines in the past two years, the telecom regulator Trai has finally given into the industry pressure, saying making roaming free is not feasible, but has slashed the charges by more than half and also asked operators to allow free roaming on payment of a fixed fee from July 1. Reducing national roaming charges for others by up to 57 per cent, Trai, however, said making national roaming completely free is not practical as of now. The last of the many missed deadlines to make roaming free January this year. Roaming fees constitute more than 10 percent of the total revenue of the bleeding telcos.
"The authority has decided to reduce the ceiling (upper price for roaming call and SMS rates) across the board, permitting telecom providers to issue special tariff vouchers and mandating that a roaming plan will be offered (to post-paid customers)," Trai chairman Rahul Khullar said in the Capital. Trai had in 2007 fixed ceilings on roaming fees at Rs 1.40 a minute for outgoing local calls and Rs 2.40 per minute for outgoing STD calls. These ceilings have been slashed to Re 1 a minute for outgoing local calls and Rs 1.50 for outgoing STD calls.
Similarly, the ceiling for incoming calls while on national roaming has been reduced from Rs 1.75 per minute to 75 paise per minute. Khullar said operators have 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 rationale is let 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 plans that a company is allowed to offer to its customers. "The essential idea of free roaming is that roaming tariff should be equal to home tariff (when customer is not roaming)…. the short point which we want to make is fully free roaming is not practical," he said.
The present exercise to review national roaming tariffs was initiated by Trai earlier this year in the context of decline in costs and the declared intent in the New Telecom Policy-2012 to move towards ‘One Nation-One Number’ across the country. The National Telecom Policy, 2012 aims to abolish roaming charges and allow mobile phone subscribers to use the same number across the country without having to pay extra charges for services once they are outside their telecom circles.
