When visiting your native place or on a vacation you no longer have to worry about exorbitant roaming charges.
In fact, making calls while on the go has just got cheaper!
Most of the major telecom carriers such as Airtel, Vodafone, Reliance and Idea have announced about slashing roaming tariffs by up to 40 percent.
This is good news for Indian telecom subscribers as for long they have been holding themselves back in terms of making or receiving calls while roaming.
What Kind of Reduced Tariffs Customers would enjoy?
Let’s take a look at the slashed tariff rates that subscribers would enjoy going forward.
|
Previous Roaming Rate (till April 30) |
Revised Rate (from May 1) |
Rate Reduction (in %) |
|
|
Incoming Calls |
0.75/min |
0.45/min |
40 |
|
Outgoing Local Calls |
1.00/min |
0.80/min |
20 |
|
Outgoing STD |
1.50/min |
1.15/min |
23 |
|
SMS Local |
1.00 |
0.25 |
75 |
|
SMS STD |
1.50 |
0.38 |
75 |
From the chart above you can figure out that the tariff reduction is significant. Especially, the charges for incoming calls have slashed by 40 percent along with 75 percent reduction in SMS charges for local and STD respectively.
Read Also : Airtel most complained against, Vodafone second – TRAI
Why the Telecom Operators are Jumping onto the Bandwagon?
This sharp reduction in tariff rates may look like a frenzy to grab a major pie of the telecom market share. However, the true reason is government intervention on deciding the new tariff rates.
Let’s have some insights.
The Telecom Authority of India (TRAI) had earlier proposed to reduce the ceiling of the tariff charges. Many telecom operators opposed this move citing the reason that it will bring down their revenues substantially.
TRAI argued in favor of its decision and stated that any loss in revenues is expected to be compensated by a surge in traffic. It will also provide leverage to the subscribers to use their mobiles more often without fearing about roaming charges.
With this consumer-friendly national roaming charges, more subscribers would now be able to avail services in their home network and when travelling beyond the geographical coverage area of the home network. With the new regulation, consumers can make and receive calls at economical rates when roaming in the 22 licensed service areas across the country.