In its effort to spur growth in the mobile segment, the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) has recently given its approval to inter-service-area connectivity in the states of Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal. Simply put, this means that calls within these states will be treated as local calls. The new policy came into effect late May.
Till now, the three metros ?? Chennai, Kolkata and Mumbai ?? were treated as separate telecom circles from their respective states (Tamil Nadu, West Bengal and Maharashtra). Therefore, calls between, say, Mumbai and the rest of Maharashtra were treated as STD calls.
Similarly, Uttar Pradesh was divided into two separate telecom circles for licensing purposes: Uttar Pradesh (East) and Uttar Pradesh (West). And subscribers had to pay STD charges to connect between the two circles. These calls will now be treated as local calls.
As the union minister for communications and IT, Dayanidhi Maran, puts it, “This is a significant move aimed at bringing parity among all the states in India, which will eventually go towards the longterm target of `One India’ parity.
The move makes sense. It removes the “artificial” separation created by telecom authorities between the state capital and the rest of the state, a barrier that existed in only these four states. All other subscribers could make calls within the state by paying local charges.
The discrepancy goes back to the time when licences for mobile services were initially granted for Chennai, Delhi, Mumbai and Kolkata. Subsequently, licences were granted for the other circles, including the state capitals. The government, therefore, decided to remove this difference in public interest, said a statement issued by DoT.
The order is also expected to level the playing field for private cellular operators, as BSNL, one of the key operators in Tamil Nadu for instance, is already offering local call facility between Chennai and the rest of the state. (Since it does not have to pay access deficit charges, it has been able to pass on this benefit to the consumers.
The order will, however, be applicable only to calls terminating in the mobile network. This means that only calls from mobile-to-mobile and fixed-to-mobile phones within the states would be considered as local calls. Also, the order does not permit service providers in a circle to create infrastructure outside their existing licensed service areas for the purpose of inter-service-area connectivity. For instance, operators like Hutch in Chennai and BPL Mobile in the rest of Tamil Nadu cannot extend their services to Tamil Nadu and Chennai respectively.
For mobile users, the new order is more than welcome. It will result in direct savings in roaming and national long distance charges, which, in turn, will push mobile growth in these states and increase usage in mobile-to-mobile and fixed-tomobile phone services.
The GSM segment alone includes 17.69 million subscribers, of which Maharashtra accounts for 7.5 million, Tamil Nadu nearly 4.5 million, West Bengal 2.15 million and Uttar Pradesh over 3.5 million. Apart from these, there is a large base of CDMA subscribers in these states, all of whom stand to benefit from the new order.
Close on the heels of DoT’s directive, BPL Mobile, a leading cellular operator in Maharashtra, announced the introduction of local dialling facility for calls to Mumbai for its Maharashtra and Goa subscribers. The facility is available on mobile calls for both its post-paid and prepaid subscribers who can therefore now dial their number directly, without prefixing “0” for calls to Mumbai.
Likewise, with the merging of the Uttar Pradesh east and west circles into a single service area, BSNL too has merged the Uttaranchal service area with that of Uttar Pradesh. “All calls within Uttar Pradesh and those between Uttar Pradesh and Uttaranchal will now be treated as local calls. STD-barred telephone subscribers within the three service areas can also access this facility by using the “95” group dialling facility, as mobile-tomobile, landline-to-mobile and landlineto-landline calls within these service areas will be treated as intra-circle calls from May 25,” stated a BSNL release.
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