Trai trims roaming tariffs for calls,text messages

Roaming charges for subscribers will come down soon as per the plan announced by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of

Roaming charges for subscribers will come down soon as per the plan announced by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) on Monday.

The new plan,however,stops short of doing away with roaming charges altogether which the government had thought of bringing in at one time. This will help the telecom players as most of them are already in line with the new slabs. But the operators will also soon have to offer tariff plans to make incoming calls free on their networks,notes a report by UBS Investment Research. Roaming occurs when a telecom subscriber moves out from her home circle and yet continues to receive or send calls or transmit data using the available telecom service provider. For this roaming facility the home operator charges her an extra amount.

The revised charges will come into effect from next month under the conditional free national roaming plans. From July 1 the maximum charges on all roaming calls have been clipped by at least 30 per cent. Trai has reduced ceilings for national roaming calls and SMS and instituted a new regime for providing flexibility to telecom service providers to customise tariffs for national roamers through STVs (Special Tariff Vouchers) and Combo Vouchers, it said in a statement.

The UBS report on the Indian mobile sector noted that the reduction in ceilings will have minimal impact on operators financials as current prevailing tariffs in the market are largely inline with updated ceilings. The ceiling tariffs 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,while on national roaming. These have been reduced to Rs 1 per minute and Rs 1.50 per minute,respectively.

Similarly,the ceiling tariffs for incoming calls,while on national roaming,have been reduced from Rs 1.75 per minute to 75 paise per minute. Based on its analysis,Trai concluded that a fully free roaming regime is simply not practicable at this juncture though the National Telecom Policy 2012 had suggested it.