The Government on Thursday said that it will try to start national free roaming services for mobile consumers before October.

Speaking on the sidelines of an event, Communications and IT Minister Kapil Sibal said: “Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) has floated a consultation paper on it (national free roaming). So when TRAI 's recommendations come, we will try to start free roaming before October.”

As telecom operators have to pay various charges like termination charge, interconnect charge, for completing the call of their customers on to other networks, the burden has to be passed on to the end-consumers.

Pre-consultation paper

TRAI had in December floated a pre-consultation paper seeking inputs from stakeholders on the aspects of national roaming services like the cost component of call rates, and tariff for video calls and SMS, while roaming.

National Internet Registry

Meanwhile, Sibal launched the National Internet Registry (NIR), which will reduce the cost of processing IP addresses.

The Department of Electronics and Information Technology (DeitY) had earlier endorsed the operations of NIR to National Internet Exchange of India (NIXI), which was recognised by the Asia Pacific Network Information Centre in March last year.

NIR has been named as Indian Registry for Internet Names and Numbers (IRINN), similar to the global Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN).

Internet protocol address

IRINN is a division under NIXI that provides allocation and registration services of Internet Protocol Addresses (IPv4 and IPv6) and autonomous systems numbers to its affiliates to the Indian Internet communities.

NIR is entrusted with the task of coordinating the IP address allocation with other Internet resource management function at national level in the country that will also enable users to create Web sites by using their own domain names.

>ronendrasingh.s@thehindu.co.in

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