Cell Operators Moot Global Roaming Body

With 42 licenced cellular operators and 32 commercially active networks in place, India has become the largest Global Standard for Mobile (GSM) country.

To consolidate this, the operators have planned to jointly form a common International Roaming Platform (IRP) of their own within the country.

The process for the setting up of an IRP is likely to be initiated by the Cellular Operators Association of India (COAI).

The IRP body will be a separate legal entity which will handle business transactions related to the roaming cellular subscribers.

India is the only country to have been granted the status of a separate GSM Interest Group by the world GSM body.

A majority of the other Interest groups in the world are confined to regions and not countries.

In roaming, there is only one other IRP platform currently available in the world.

This is offered by SwissCom which has nearly 101 networks as its members. SwissCom (known as Swiss PTT Telecom till Sept 30 1997) has a 33 per cent joint venture partnership with the Essar group.

IRP is a crucial aspect of the universality of GSM services. There are nearly 125 countries in the world who use the GSM Standard for cellular telephony with almost 60 million subscribers. These countries collectively have over 200 cellular networks.

We are looking at both the incoming and outgoing scenarios in roaming, said Satyan Nayar, general manager (operations), COAI. The idea is to allow all international GSM operators to tie up with a single entity to gain roaming access into India.

And similarly for Indian operators who would need one agreement to offer their customers roaming.

In the mobile telephony industry, roaming is a concept which allows customers of one network to move freely into the networks of other service providers without having to worry about settling different bills. Roaming can be of two types: plastic and automatic.

Today, most Indian subscribers can only use plastic roaming.

They have to change their SIM cards when moving from one network to another. In automatic roaming the same SIM card can be used everywhere. The Department of Telecomm unications (DoT) on September 12 gave permission for automatic roaming between the four metros. So a subscriber with just one SIM card can use any one of the eight networks in Calcutta, Delhi, Mumbai and Chennai.