New Delhi: The big GSM players, Bharti Airtel, Idea Cellular and Hutch, have refrained from a "me-too" behaviour and have kept roaming charges untouched, despite Rel Comm and the state-owned operators are providing the service almost free.
“In the next few days I expect other operators also to follow suit," Communications and IT minister Andimuthu Raja said.
Anil Ambani's Rel Comm did so within minutes of this announcement on the first of this month. And, it stopped there. Players like Bharti Airtel, Hutch and Idea Cellular have decided not to slash the roaming rates in the same way.
Sources say the GSM players believes that their subscribers will not be enticed to switch operators as the cut in roaming has accompanied an increase in monthly rental.
Also, roaming charges are not the key to choose service providers for most subscribers. At the higher end, quality of service matters more than rates. As for those in between, their roaming bills are not so painful as to compel them to migrate, even though half of the GSM subsribers do travel out of their home circles for four to five days in a month. The absence of number of portability makes subscribers stick to their service provider.
As roaming revenues make for around 10 per cent of the total, private GSM operators seems to have decided to stick it out. And that is why, they have not acted as a herd, unlike on other schemes like life-time validity.
This may not go down too well with the regulator and the government. They believe that operators are acting in concert.
In January, while imposing a cap on roaming tariffs, the Trai said, "Evidence available with the authority on subscriber's tariff for roaming services reveal that there appears to be a co-ordinated arrangement in the pricing of roaming services between private GSM service providers. Further in many instances in the past, changes in roaming tariff had been effected almost simultaneously.”
It is quite likely that there is a meeting of minds among the GSM operators and no cartel operating. But they will have to convince the regulator, who believes that roaming tariffs are still high.
With excerpts from moneycontrol.com
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