A roaming charge is paid by a subscriber he travels out of town and makes or receives calls, or when he dials outstation numbers.
NEW DELHI: The government is learnt to be giving a serious thought to the industry’s long-pending demand for a lower revenue-share fee at 6%, in return for scrapping the mobile roaming charges.
A roaming charge is paid by a subscriber he travels out of town and makes or receives calls, or when he dials outstation numbers.
There are two components to the roaming charge - airtime charges and interconnect charges.
An abolition without offsetting reliefs would mean losses of about Rs 4,000 crore to the telecom players.
The idea is to get mobile telecom operators to abolish roaming charges voluntarily, without the intervention of the government or perhaps even the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai).
But a decision to reduce the annual revenue-share fee, paid by mobile operators to the government, will have to be taken by the finance ministry.
The Department of Telecommunications (DoT) is in talks with telecom operators to work out ways to abolish roaming charges. The negotiations between DoT and the companies — including PSUs — are focused on the modalities of doing away with the roaming charges.
Among the modalities being discussed is that of slashing the annual revenue-share fee for operators.
It was all started by Dayanidhi Maran who, after his exit as communications minister, had told the media that he was planning abolition of national roaming charges as a gift to Tamil Nadu chief minister M Karunanidhi on his birthday on June 3.
Andimuthu Raja, who took over as the new communications minister this week, said he would consider that proposal.
On Friday in Chennai, when reporters asked him about the issue of abolition of roaming charges, Raja said, “wait and see”.
However, with June 3 just 15 days away, DoT is actively working on the idea to make Maran's - and now Raja's - gift to Karunanidhi a reality.
According to T V Ramachandran, director general of the Cellular Operators Association of India, the annual revenue-share fees of mobile operators must be slashed to 6% (from the current range of 8 to 12%) if the government wants to abolish the roaming charges.
"Reduction of revenue-share fee is a long pending demand of the industry," he said.
In February, Trai had reduced the roaming charges.
As per that tariff order, the maximum permissible charge for roaming calls, irrespective of terminating networks and tariff plans, was set at Rs 1.40 per minute for outgoing local calls, Rs 2.40 for outgoing national long distance calls and Rs 1.75 for incoming calls.
Recently, the monthly rental being charged by operators, for access to national roaming service, was also removed. Earlier, there was a monthly levy of Rs 50 for national roaming.
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