State-owned BSNL has gone ahead and slashed tariffs again. With hardly any scope to cut per minute rates, it has gone ahead and slashed roaming tariffs. The Free Roaming plan, is restricted to the post-paid subscribers of BSNL. Under this, on a Rs 550 plan, a subscriber can receive up to 300 minutes of incoming calls while roaming every month. That's a huge amount of free incoming calls. However, outgoing calls will be priced at 40 paise per minute to BSNL/MTNL subscribers and Re 1 per minute for other subscribers. Any BSNL/MTNL subscriber can opt for the new plan without any additional charges.
Obviously, the private operators will follow suit. It remains to be seen how quickly they will do so.
What is still not clear is how much revenues will BSNL lose with such a scheme. Well, so long as the scheme is restricted to post-paid subscribers, it will benefit roughly 6 million of BSNL's 28 million subscribers. But, then these are the subscribers who provide you the jam. It remains to be seen whether this scheme will result in an increased post-paid subscriber base.
As a colleague asked, when do we see free calling? Well that can and will happen provided value-added services take-off. Already voice is a commodity. Look out for the next announcement.
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