Throwing away the extra barrier of roaming rates, now get connected freely with your family and friends while roaming in any part of India. Govt owned telecom operator Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL) will start offering its pan India customers with nationwide free roaming service starting from 15th June 2015. This means BSNL customers can now get free incoming calls while on roaming, which was earlier being charged around 45 paise per minute.
Announcing free roaming, Union minister for Communications and Information Technology, Ravi Shankar Prasad said “BSNL will start offering free national roaming from June 15. It’s already on the recovery path.”
“Although there could be slight reduction in revenue on account of free incoming calls during roaming, we expect to gain first-mover advantage and anticipate offsetting this amount by arresting churn-out/ porting out and acquiring new customers” said Anupam Shrivastava, BSNL CMD.
Minister also added that full mobile number portability (MNP), will come into effect from July 2015 and this will allow users to easily change their telecom operator without changing their phone number from anywhere in India irrespective of telecom circles. As first sign, you can now call STD phone numbers without adding 0 or +91 prefix. Earlier in May most of the telecom operators including BSNL dropped national roaming charges by 75% for voice calls and SMS.
Free roaming will directly benefit 7.72 crore subscribers in BSNL network, pan India. However free incoming calls will be offered as a promotional scheme to BSNL customers for a period of one year.