Airtel slashes roaming rates by 60%

Mobile services provider, Bharti Airtel, reduced its roaming rates by nearly 60 per cent. Customers who enroll into the Airtel Turbo plan will now be charged at 60 paise per minute for all incoming calls while on roaming. The new plan is available for both existing and new customers effective Friday.

“Airtel Turbo offers local and STD outgoing calls to any Airtel mobile customer while roaming at 60 paise per minute, while calls to another network will be 80 paise per minute,” Sharlin Thayil, chief executive officer (mobile services – AP circle) of Airtel, told mediapersons.

Airtel prepaid mobile customers, wishing to avail of the new roaming benefit will be charged a plan enrollment fee of Rs 98, which gives an incoming validity of one year. The Airtel Turbo service is also available with a monthly rental plan in postpaid. Airtel currently has 12 million subscribers in Andhra Pradesh. The company has 9,000 cell towers, covering 90 per cent of the state’s population.

To boost telephony in rural and remote areas, Thayil said, the company had recently connected Araku Valley in Visakhapatnam district with the V-Sat network. “The Airtel network linked through V-SAT is already in place in various locations like the Andaman and Nicobar Islands and Himachal Pradesh. We are now in the process of identifying more such remote areas across Andhra Pradesh, including Yanam and some islands in East Godavari district,” he added.