'Free' roaming may mean higher mobile tariffs

New Delhi: Not only will national roaming charges stay for some more time, tariffs may rise once these charges are abolished.

The New Telecom Policy 2012 has proposed that all roaming charges be abolished but Telecom Secretary R Chandrashekhar said today that it will take another year for this to happen. The Department of Telecom (DoT) is right now working on the unified licence (UL) guidelines - one of the key provisions of NTP 2012. After the finalisation of the UL, and when the spectrum auction process gets over, the ‘one nation-free roaming’ policy will also be implemented in due time, he said.

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“All these things are inter-related. We have initiated the process and its implementation is likely next year,” Chandrashekhar said.

But service providers have their own take in the matter. Rajan Mathews of the Cellular Operators’ Association of India (COAI) said there are several issues which need to be sorted out before national roaming is abolished. He also said that it is common international practice to adjust tariffs as the country moves from regional calling patterns to national calling patterns.

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“Yes, tariffs may get adjusted but then, no one price fits all and tariff options will continue to remain available to consumers”.

He pointed towards many issues before migrating to a no-roaming charge regime: conversion of circle-wise licences of telcos to a national licence; state-level connections; security and privacy issues.

Mathews said at present all telcos operate on a circle to circle licence, which will first have to be converted into a national licence - the Unified License Chandrashekhar spoke about. Then, telcos will have to invest in restructuring their networks, he said without elaborating on the costs involved.

Also, issues of state security would have to be addressed - at present one state is not allowed access to information about subscribers in another state and this will have to be resolved. Also, privacy issues will need to be tackled.

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Mathews said that though roaming customers do not account for a large chunk of telco revenues - only about 10 percent - these are high-margin services and when they cease, telcos will have to look at how to adjust tariffs to keep their revenue flows healthy.