Trai ammends regulations to allow for special tariff vouchers with 365-days of validity

The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) on Friday released the Telecom Consumers Protection (Tenth Amendment) Regulations, 2016 permitting special data vouchers with longer validity of 365 days.

The present regulatory regime allows telecom service providers (TSP) to offer data services in the form of special tariff vouchers either exclusively or in combination with other tariff items with a maximum permitted validity of 90 days, an official statement here said.

“Requests were received in TRAI seeking longer validity of data-packs primarily to address the concern of marginal consumers of wireless Internet who prefer lower denomination data packs with longer validity,” the statement added.

In related news, Airtel announced that it would be giving 3GB of free data every month for a year to anyone who switched to an Airtel network by 28 February. Idea Cellular soon followed suit with an offer of 3GB of data for free to anyone who upgraded to a new 4G handset.

Data rates for prepaid numbers has also fallen dramatically since the announcement of Reliance Jio’s trial offer that granted its users unlimited data and voice calling for many months. This offer has now been extended to March 2017.

With inputs from IANS