New Delhi: Telecom operator Airtel Wednesday launched a 10-day international roaming packs starting at Rs 1,199 with free incoming calls and reduced mobile Internet rack rate by 99 percent to Rs 3 per megabyte.
"The 10-day roaming pack starts at Rs 1,199 for Singapore and Thailand, offers unlimited free incoming calls, 2GB data, 250 minutes of free calling to India and 100 free SMS daily," Airtel said in a statement.
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The company has launched these special packs for people traveling to Singapore, Thailand, the US, Canada, the UK and the the UAE.
The 10-day pack for US-Canada and the UK is available for Rs 2,999 and offers unlimited free incoming calls, 2GB data, 250 minutes of free calling to India and 100 free SMS daily.
The plan for the UAE will also cost the same with similar benefits, except that the subscriber will get only 250 minutes of free incoming calls.
In all the plans, the subscriber will be charged Rs 3 per megabyte after 2GB data limit gets exhausted, which is "a reduction of 99 percent from Rs 650 per MB", the statement said.
Airtel to approach TRAI, DoT over penalty
Meanwhile, Bharti Airtel said that it will approach government and telecom regulator Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) to clear the "confusion" that led to proposed penalty of over Rs 1,000 crore on it for not providing interconnection facility to Reliance JIO Infocomm.
"We are aware of proposed penalty. We believe there is confusion here. We will find way to go back to TRAI and Department of Telecom (DoT). We are very confident that government will take a very objective position in the Herculean efforts we have put to resolve this issue," Bharti Airtel MD and CEO for India and South Asia Gopal Vittal said.
The TRAI has recommended the DoT to slap total penalty of Rs 3,050 crore on Bharti Airtel, Vodafone and Idea Cellular for not resolving interconnection issue with Reliance Jio despite its direction that led to high call failure on laters network.
"It is part of our regulatory obligation that we provide connect. At the end of the day it is our job to fight in the market and serve customers better. So this is a non-issue," Vittal said.
He said that Jio announced on August 31, that they would launch services on September 5.
"There is lot of augmentation that we have done on points of interconnect. We have never seen that kind of augmentation that we have ever done in the past," Vittal said.
He said that the interconnection ports that Airtel has provided per million of customers is more that 2.5 times than of any other operator in India.
"The regulation allows you 90 days to all these augmentation. We have done it literally in 5 weeks," Vittal said.
Talking about Airtel strategy to counter Reliance Jio's free 4G mobile service, Vittal said that it is very difficult to offer free service in response, but company will look at offering more bundled service like Jio is offering to counter threat from it.
"We believe that when something is free there is only way to compete is to go and give it for free. It is very difficult. In that sense we are watching that space. Free stuff also has impact on quality of network. We are keeping track on that," Vittal said.
(With agency inputs)