Phone Bills Set To Go Down

[Mahidhar 3]

Phone bills set to go down

Jun. 23, 2004

Come October and your phone bills could get smaller. Tariffs could fall across the board — for all mobile and fixed-line phones and for all types of calls, countrywide. The cuts will come as the result of a revision in the existing ‘access deficit charge’ (ADC) regime. ADC is the amount that private operators (like Airtel, Hutch, Reliance, Tata etc.) pay Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd (BSNL) to subsidise its operations in low-profit rural markets. On Wednesday, telecom regulator TRAI will unveil a public consultation paper on the proposed changes in the ADC. It will propose a shift from the current system in which BSNL gets a part of what you pay every time you make a call, to a system in which BSNL will get a fixed percentage from the provider’s total revenues. ADC levies are currently 30 paise to 80 paise/minute for domestic calls, and Rs 4.25/minute for overseas calls. The charges are built into the per-minute tariff that you pay to your provider. Last year, TRAI shrunk the ADC kitty from Rs 13,000 crore to Rs 4,000 crore. It now wants to cut this amount by half. The substantial savings that providers will make are likely to be passed on to consumers. “Our intention is to ensure that only BSNL gets ADC as it has the responsibility for rural telephony. But the amount of ADC has to be lower. The emphasis is on moving towards a revenue-sharing regime as against the present call-to-call system,” TRAI chairman Pradip Baijal told the Hindustan Times. Another reason for the rethink on the current regime is TRAI’s desire to snuff out the large illegal overseas call market that the current high ADC on international calls has spawned.

[niket 0]

Gr8 wait till October.