Reliance Jio Effect: Airtel kills domestic roaming

Moneycontrol NewsMarket leader Bharti Airtel announced on Monday that it would completely kill domestic roaming charges from April 1 while pledging to end bill shocks for customers using their Airtel connections abroad.The move comes a week after new entrant Reliance Jio’s introduction of tariff plans, which effectively offers 1 GB data daily at Rs 10 while promising free voice calls for life. Sunil Mittal, Chairman of Bharti Enterprises, said that Airtel will offer free incoming calls and SMSes while roaming across India, and there will be no extra charges on on outgoing calls and data while outstation.Gopal Vittal, MD & CEO (India & South Asia), Bharti Airtel said: “This marks the death of national roaming and the whole country will now be like a local network for our customers."Mittal also said that one of his priorities was to fix the problem of international roaming as Indians travelling abroad often run up bills in lakhs owing to steep roaming charges.He said that from April 1, such customers will soon be able to avail of a per day package at an extremely low rate equal to the daily pack in the country they are visiting, while those hitting the threshold will be moved to a one-day pack. Mittal said that even customers who do not avail of these packs will be protected from bill shocks through automatic adjustment.The telecom operator said that call charges have been reduced by up to 90 percent to as low as Rs 3 per minute and data charges by up to 99 percent to Rs 3 per MB across popular roaming destinations. In his capacity as Chairman of the GSMA, Mittal called on other telecom operators to move towards killing international roaming.The move will benefit about 268 million mobile customers, who have high-end bundled plans that offer free calling, currently limited to a small segment of subscribers. Airtel's new plans can been as an effort to regain its dominance after recording a 55 percent slump in profits in the third quarter from a year earlier. Jio's entry has shaken up the telecom sector and speeded up consolidaton in the sector. While Airtel announced the acquisition of Telenor last week, Vodafone India and Idea Cellular are in talks for a merger that it would make the combine the largest telecom player in the country.Last October, Vodafone made incoming calls to its network free while on roaming.(Disclosure: Reliance Industries, the parent company of Reliance Jio, owns Network 18 that publishes Moneycontrol.com.)