Aircel goes free on inbound roaming

In a move to attract more customers, especially youngsters and frequent travellers, mobile service provider Aircel on Wednesday announced the launch of ‘Five States, One Rate’ plan.

Under this offering, Aircel customers can enjoy free roaming in all the five Southern States — Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, and Karnataka — starting from Thursday (June 11).

Speaking at the launch, Circle business head, Karnataka, Kanwarbir Singh said there was no need to activate this pack, and by default it gets activated when a customer moves from one state to another.

“Customers usually get scared to take calls while on roaming, and we came up with this new offering after understanding their requirements. While incoming calls are free, both the outgoing local and outgoing STD will cost one paise per second. If you take the current rates in the market, it is 45 paise/min for incoming, and Rs 1.15/min for outgoing local destination calls,” said Singh, adding this new offering applies to both prepaid and postpaid users.

The telecom operator saw 35 per cent revenue growth in December 2014, compared with the same period last year. “We have six per cent RMS (revenue market share) in Bengaluru, and the data revenue contribution is 23 per cent on total revenue. We have added 360 new towers in the last six months, and are planning to add 200 more in the next three to four months,” he said at the launch.

Aircel has found that most of its roaming revenue come from the other four southern states, and that more number of people from Karnataka go to these states often for business or leisure.

When asked about the 4G trials in Bengaluru, Singh said they are concentrating on 3G. “We are doing trials in eight locations in India. There are lots of challenges in 4G, but now our focus here in Karnataka, especially Bengaluru, is 3G. We have huge potential on data,” he said.