No roaming charges for Aircel subscribers in south India

Chennai: Aircel subscribers in Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Kerala, Telangana and Puducherry will not be charged for incoming calls while they are travelling within these states, a senior official said on Wednesday.

As 40 percent of the mobile phone subscribers who have roaming facility do not answer incoming calls while travelling fearing roaming charges, Aircel aims to break this jinx with this announcement.

"From Thursday onwards, Aircel subscribers in the southern region (Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Kerala, Telangana and Puducherry) will not be charged for incoming calls while they are travelling within these states," said Sankara Narayanan K, strategic business unit head.

According to Narayanan, the subscriber has to manually choose Aircel network when they go to other southern cities/towns so as to enjoy free incoming calls.

He said the outgoing local and STD calls will be charged one paise per second.

According to him, the systems will be configured accordingly for all the subscribers -whether they have prepaid or postpaid accounts.

He said mobile phone subscribers with roaming facility are growing at a fast pace from nine percent in 2010 to 30 percent in 2014.

Narayanan said while at an average local calls account for a talk time of 383 minutes per month, calls while roaming account for 80 minutes per month.

Though the roaming talk time has grown, people are reluctant to answer incoming calls fearing the charges, he said.