Since the Telecom Regulations Authority of India has been constituted with the prime task of protection of interest of the service providers and consumers of the telecom sector, and to promote and ensure orderly growth of the telecom sector, the authority said it would evolve a sustainable regulatory policy.
TRAI said the lifetime validity tariff plans, recently launched by a number of mobile operators, raise the following issues: the long-term viability and sustainability of these plans, whether lifetime can exceed the balance licence period of the operators and if not, would the plans vary in their validity duration, what will happen to the plans if the traffic patterns and Interconnect User Charges regime changes substantially, and the matter of protection of interest of consumers who are subscribing to the life time tariff plan.
The authority also recalled that one of the service providers had recently launched a two-year scheme not requiring any recharge for incoming calls.
At the time of examination of this scheme, the Authority had examined the relevant traffic data of the service provider and had found that as per that data and the present IUC regime, the scheme could be viable with minimal assumptions.
However, in respect of the recently launched lifetime tariff schemes by the mobile service providers, they had neither given data for examining viability nor the basis for arriving at a reasonable conclusion.
Therefore, the authority issued orders under section 12 (1) (a) of TRAI Act seeking information relating to traffic, cost and revenue details from all those service providers who have announced and implemented tariff schemes under the name and style of lifetime validity or unlimited validity or lifelong validity. This would help in examining the viability of these schemes.
The consultation paper would be issued by January 15, 2006. The Authority expects that the final decision in this regard would be taken by February 2006.
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