Free roaming likely before Oct

Telecom Minister Kapil Sibal on Thursday said the government will try to start national free roaming for mobile phone users, before October this year.

“Currently,  the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) is holding consultation with various stakeholders in this regard. Once the regulator makes its recommendations, we will try to start free roaming before October,” Sibal told reporters on the sidelines of the launch of National Internet Registry (NIR) here.

In December, the TRAI had floated a pre-consultation paper seeking inputs from stakeholders on tariff for national roaming services.

At present, telecom operators have to pay various charges like termination charge, interconnect charges for completing a call of their customers to other networks, which get added to the final cost of the call for the customer.

The National Internet Registry (NIR) launched by the minister will reduce the cost of processing IP addresses.

NIR is entrusted with the task of coordinating IP address allocation with other Internet resource management function at the national level.

The Department of Electronics and Information Technology (DEITY) had earlier endorsed the operations of NIR to National Internet Exchange of India (NIXI). NIXI was recognised by the Asia Pacific Network Information Centre (APNIC) in March last year.