Recently Reliance has launched the commercial Full Roaming throughout the nation WITHOUT any rentals or activation charge ( auto-activation ) at rock bottom charge of Rs. 2/min for incoming/outgoing to any phone, CDMA/GSM/Fixed Line !
For the Dirubhai Ambani Pioneer Offer subscribers, the rates of roaming will be 40p for first 400 min for incoming, and Re.1 for outgoing.
Objectively speaking, this move by Reliance will not only benefit the Reliance customers but also the GSM ( Hutch, Orange, Airel, BSNL, etc) customers.
The GSM operators charge anything between Rs. 5.44 to 7.44 / min for outgoing and 5.44 or 6.44 / min for incoming calls.
Now the GSM operators will be under pressure to rationalise their prohibitive rates and bring it closer to the Reliance rates!
The effects of Reliance’s roaming rates will benefit both the CDMA and GSM customers, and for me personally, it would be a double benefit since in our family we have both CDMA as well as GSM customers.
Competition sure is a boon for he consumers, who finally might start getting treated like ’king’.
It would be further beneficial to ALL customers if the GSM operators bring down their local call rates to 2 / min for prepaid customers which currently hangs in between 2.4 - 3. , since Reliance already has a rate of 2/min in the plan 149.
What would be firing the competition in coming days would be the fact that Reliance is coming out with Prepaid scheme in early 2004 !!
So with lower rentals, it would further boost the competition across the board.