TRAI’s roaming order positive for telcos, not so much for users

If you were waiting to get free roaming services on your mobile phone from October then it may not happen.

The telecom regulator’s decision against blanket waiver of roaming charges is good news for telecom companies but not for subscribers.

‘disappointed’

Speaking to

Business Line , Gurdeep Singh, Chief Executive Officer, Reliance Communications, said, “We were hoping that TRAI would bring in free roaming for the benefit of subscribers. We are disappointed that this did not happen.”

Reliance Communications is the only operator to have supported the proposal to waive roaming charges.

“The argument that waiver of roaming charges would lead to higher tariffs is a short-term view. Over the longer period, telecom companies would have been able to recover the loss, if any, through increase in roaming volumes,” Gurdeep said, adding that RCom is looking whether it can waive roaming charges on its own which would then force others to follow.

But other telcos and analysts said that the TRAI’s decision was pragmatic. “We consider the policy to be balanced as it achieves the government objective of allowing free national roaming and does not materially impact telco revenues. Most telcos we spoke to (post this news) do not expect any major negative impact on earnings,” Goldman Sachs said in a report.

TRAI stated that it is not practicable to implement full free national roaming but it would allow free roaming for a fixed fee from July 1.

Furthermore, TRAI capped national roaming tariff on outgoing local calls to Rs 1/minute (earlier Rs 1.4) and also has put a limit of Rs 1.5/minute (earlier Rs 2.4) on inter-city calls. Outer limit on incoming calls during roaming has been fixed at Rs 0.75/minute (earlier Rs 1.75). TRAI also allowed special tariff vouchers and combo vouchers to continue.

‘May not gain much’

But all of this does not mean much for users because most operators are already offering such vouchers. Even the existing roaming tariffs being offered by mobile operators are in line with the new ceiling set by TRAI. Even though there is a 57 per cent reduction in the ceiling tariff compared to the earlier ceiling, subscribers may not gain much.

TRAI, however, said that subscribers will benefit from the reduced ceiling as competitive pricing below the new ceiling levels is expected.

>thomas.thomas@thehindu.co.in