The national free roaming service slated to get implemented from March this year has reportedly
been postponed till October this year.
Kapil Sibal, Minister of
Communications and Information Technology, has recently announced that
the implementation of the Free National Roaming for operator services
across the country will come into action by the October. This will be
the second time that the Government has postponed the time of
implementation of this service ever since it had mentioned it in the
National Telecom Policy 2012.
Ever since the release of the National Telecom Policy last year,
Indian operators have been opposing the move of freeing roaming charges
as they have their own concerns about revenues from the service. The
industry still has not been able to garner fruits from 3G services and
generates a major chunk of revenues from voice service.
Roaming charges
include 9 percent of the revenues thus generated by the operators and
abolishing it would lead them to lose a big portion of the revenues.
Essentially, it has reportedly been due to the industry’s dependence
on revenues generated from voice that the Government has given the
operators some more time and pushed to abolish the roaming charges till
October.
Moreover, COAI has also been reported to be against the move and has
said that this move will hit the telcos in big way, and will be
discriminatory as well as destructive for the operators. Also, if forced
in to action, this free roaming policy would also lead to an increase
in tariffs by the operators, as they will fill the revenue gap created
by free roaming by inflaming the tariffs of other services.
For last one year I am reading such news that within 3 months it will be implemented. Last time I heard, it will be implemented within Feb 2013. Now see what is happening! Dlrty vote politics by Congress before 2014.
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