Telecom regulator TRAI on Monday allowed free mobile roaming on payment of a fixed fee from July 1 and reduced national roaming charges for others by up to 57 per cent.
TRAI, however, said making national roaming completely free of charges is not practical as of now. "The authority has decided to reduce the ceiling (upper price for roaming call and SMS rates) across board, permitting telecom providers to issue special tariff voucher and mandating that a roaming plan will be offered (for post paid customers)," TRAI Chairman Rahul Khullar said.
The ceilings on roaming charges prescribed by Trai in 2007 were Rs 1.40 per minute for outgoing local calls and Rs 2.40 per minute for outgoing STD calls. These ceilings have been reduced to Re 1 per minute for outgoing local calls and Rs 1.50 per minute 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 fix charge will be levied and in the other regime you don't give free incoming and there will be no fixed charges.
The philosophy of authority 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.
Telecom Minister Kapil Sibal had earlier said that free national roaming would be implemented by October.
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-Free Roaming throughout the country.
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.
Asked about the implementation of mobile number portability on national level, Khullar said work is going on in the matter but it is not likely this year.
Full mobile number portability, if implemented as per NTP 2012, will allow customers to retain their mobile number when they move to any other circle without having to pay roaming charges. Khullar said that National Telecom Policy 2012 talks about working towards free roaming regime and not immediate implementation of national free roaming.
He further said that regulator would review the regime after a year instead of current practice of reviewing tariff after three years.
TRAI Chairman said that telecom operators are required to pay charges for using network of other service provider to transmitting and completing calls of their customers.
"Free incoming call imply that you will never be able recover carriage and you never will be able to recover incoming call cost. Rough orders of estimate show... something like that would cost you over Rs 2,000 crore to Rs 2,500 crore per annum," Khullar said.
He added that making incoming calls free during roaming would "create huge amount of market distortion".
"If I am unable to recover Rs 2,000 crore to Rs 2,500 crore (then) home tariff would have to rise. Then you would have situation where roamers will be subsidised by non-roamers. Given that 13 per cent of subscribers are roamers, you will be effectively asking 87 per cent non-roamers to subsidise this smaller portion," he said.
