Trai floats pre-consultation paper on free roaming
The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) on Thursday floated a pre-consultation paper, seeking inputs from stakeholders on rates for national roaming services, taking a step ahead towards the proposed free roaming.
The regulator has set a deadline of January 17, 2013, for comments. It is to then issue a consultation paper. Based on the recommendations, the department of telecommunications will take a decision on the framework of national roaming. The government has already announced it would be allowed in early 2013.
Trai has sought the views of stakeholders on different aspects of national roaming services, such as the cost components of call rates to be considered, ‘the manner of recovery of cost in case incoming calls are to be made free’, the rate for video calls and SMS while roaming, and the need for permitting special rate vouchers for roaming customers.
Telecom operators have strongly opposed free roaming, saying they’d together lose at least Rs 13,500 crore. Nationwide free roaming was announced as part of the National Telecom Policy 2012, approved in May this year. As part of the One Nation-Free Roaming plan, consumers will not have to pay the present hefty roaming charges while travelling out of their home telecom circle.
The industry estimates free roaming would benefit about 12 per cent of all mobile users. There were about 900 million wireless subscribers in the country till October, according to Trai data. The current average roaming charge is 75p to a rupee a minute. And, telcos have to pay various charges such as those for termination and interconnection for completing the calls of their customers on to other networks, which get added to the final cost of a call for customers.
Trai said the rate for Nation Roaming Services was previously specified by it on January 24, 2007. “The access deficit charges regime was phased out in 2008 and termination charges lowered from Rs 0.30 to Rs 0.20 a minute in year 2009,” it said.