No roaming charges from March 2013: Report

By Kul Bhushan | Updated on 04-Dec-2012

04-Dec-2012

Good news for mobile phone users in the country. Roaming charges are likely to be abolished from March next year despite strong opposition from the mobile phone companies.

According to a Times of India report, an internal DoT note dated November 23 says the department has listed the move to abolish roaming, as proposed in the National Telecom Policy 2012, among the ‘key initiatives to be completed within the next three months’. The report further says, the department is also looking to popularise Mobile Number Portability (MNP) and allow inter-state portability so that subscribers can retain their phone numbers when moving to a new state in the country. Currently, the MNP facility only allows customers to retain their number within same circle.

The government’s plans to remove roaming charges have met strong opposition from the mobile phone companies. It is believed that the roaming accounts for about 10 percent of their revenues, and the move to do away with roaming charges may prompt them to increase tariffs to compensate this loss.

According to an estimate, telecom operators may suffer a loss up to Rs 13,500 crore in revenues.

“Currently, the roaming charges are borne only by those who avail of the roaming service. Operators would need to recover this loss in roaming revenues leading to tariff increase which will be equally borne by the non-roaming customer base. To create a new tariff equilibrium, the tariffs in some non-affluent parts of country will go up and in other parts will drop,” TOI quotes an executive with a leading GSM operator.

Mobile phone companies also say that abolishing roaming charges would lead to free-flow of SIMs across circles on a permanent basis.

“It is possible that SIMs or mobile connections of the circle that offers lowest STD tariff in the country, would be picked up by customer residing in other circles, who will use these to make discounted STD calls since the tariff in their own circles are higher. This potential revenue loss on account of this tariff arbitrage would make it necessary for the players to adopt a single tariff pan-India, thereby also resulting in a doing away of ‘Local’ & ‘STD’ as a concept,” the executive quoted above added.

The Cellular Operators Associations of India has also opposed the government’s plans to do away with roaming charges, saying the DoT should first address a range of policy-related issues, such as migration to the unified licence before directing the telecom operators to end the charges.

Source: TOI

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