Airtel does away with roaming charges

NEWDELHI: India’s largest telecom company Bharti Airtel Ltd on Monday dropped domestic roaming charges, matching rival Reliance Jio Infocomm Ltd, as chairman Sunil Mittal urged regulators to encourage consolidation.

In a statement, Bharti Airtel said all incoming calls and messages will be free and no premium will be charged on outgoing calls while roaming across India from April 1. There won’t be any data roaming charges either. Home data packs will apply even while customers roam across India.

The move was first reported by The Economic Times on Monday.

Starting April 1, even customers on international roaming without a pack will be fully protected from “bill shocks” through an automatic adjustment that is equal to the daily pack for that particular country, Bharti Airtel said in the statement. “This means that the moment a customer’s billing reaches the price of a one-day pack for the country, he/she will be automatically moved to that pack. This will allow our customers to use their devices abroad without any fear.”

This essentially means that when a customer travelling to the US without a pack hits the threshold of ₹649 (the price of the oneday pack for the US), he/she will automatically move to the oneday pack with free incoming calls/SMSes, 100 India and local country outgoing minutes, 300 MB data and other benefits.

Similarly, a customer travelling to Singapore will move to the one-day pack the moment his/ her usage hits the ₹499 mark.

In Barcelona on Monday, in a keynote address at the Mobile World Congress, Mittal said most regulators still live in an “analogue world” and urged them to allow consolidation. “It is time that I call upon the entire fraternity of the telecom sector to come together to kill the international roaming tariffs.”