New Delhi, February 24:
A day after
reducing the termination charges, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of
India (TRAI) has reduced carriage charges to 35 paise from 65 paise
earlier. This will make STD calls cheaper.
“The
ceiling of 65 paise for carriage charge was fixed in 2006. Thereafter,
many developments have taken place. New telecom service providers (TSPs)
have entered the national long distance... Therefore, the Authority is
of the view that there is a strong case to review the carriage charge,”
TRAI said.
National Long Distance traffic has increased significantly and the resultant lowering of costs cannot be ignored, it said.
Telecom
operators pay domestic carriage charge when their customers make an STD
call on the network of another TSP and the STD calls are transmitted
across country using network of National Long Distance operators
(NLDOs), the sector regulator said.
It
said the prevailing rate of carriage charges in the market was also
taken into account and was observed that there is a large variation. For
example, some NLDOs offer carriage charges as low as nine paise per
minute while a few others charge at the ceiling rate of 65 paise per
minute.
“The potential misuse of a high ceiling is another reason prompting a review of the carriage charge regime,” TRAI said.
“It
was noted that the average for the industry excluding BSNL was about 21
paise per minute. One of the reasons for the higher cost of carriage in
the case of BSNL is that BSNL carries a significant amount of traffic
to remote and rural areas,” it added.
TRAI will
review these charges again in 2017-18 as present networks are
transforming in to Internet based network that is expected to change
carriage cost structure.
