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Well, this is good news for all those mobile consumers who keep moving from one place to another and lose lot of their mobile balance because of roaming tariffs as the Department of Telecom (DoT) panel has come up with the strategy for all the communications industry to consider the whole country as one region and free customers from paying roaming charges when they are travelling within the country.

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Presently, the country is divided into 22 circles and the consumers pay roaming charges when they are outside their home circle.

Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) has been asked to work out the modalities for this. However, no time frame has been specified for the merger of all the circles into single entity from the licensing perspective.

However, this move of the panel is likely to get criticism from the telecom companies as this fee constitutes up to 10% of the industry’s revenues. All telcos combined garner about Rs 12,000 crore annually from roaming charges.

The panel has also sought that cellular operators be allowed to offer services on mobile phones which would speed up the government’s efforts to ensure that the weaker sections of the society have access to the facilities at affordable costs.

The panel has also called for the national policy which will be framed by TRAI that will to cell sites or telecom towers in all cities and will address issues such as the minimum distance these units must maintain from schools, hospitals and tourist attractions.

With this step, India’s first attempt to regulate the telecoms towers space in the country will be marked.

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