National Telecom Policy 2012 Approved : No Roaming Charges and Pan India MNP One Nation – One Mobile Number

The Govt of India today approved a National Telecom Policy 2012, which will replace more than a 12 years old telecom regulations and now mobile service users will be able to avail FREE Roaming and keep their Phone Numbers even if they switch service providers anywhere in the country with the Nation Wide Intra Circle MNP, proposed in the new Telecom Policy.

The cabinet has approved the new National Telecom Policy with some changes from what was proposed earlier, The New Telecom Policy recommends one Nation, one license policy across services and service areas to abolish Roaming charges. The distinction between local and STD calls would vanish, as the policy aims at a ‘one-nation-one-licence’ regime.

With the implementation of new National Telecom Policy,  Now Telecom operators/Mobile Service providers would not require any separate licences for operations in various parts of the country and a single licence would suffice.

Under the new telecom policy, telecom ministry also provisions for inter-circle Mobile Number Portability (MNP) i.e. Full MNP, which involves changing an operator while retaining the same phone number in different telecom circles.

Highlights : New National Telecom Policy 2012  :

• One Nation-One License to mean removal of Roaming charges on Mobile phone service.
• Full Mobile Number Portability and work towards One Nation – Free Roaming.
• Efforts Towards ‘Right to Broadband’
• Affordable and reliable Broadband on demand by 2015 and to achieve 175 million broadband connections by the year 2017 and 600 million by the year 2020 at minimum 2 Mbps download speed and making available higher speeds of atleast 100 Mbps on demand.
• To revise the existing broadband download speed of 256 Kbps to 512 Kbps by end of 2012 and subsequently to 2 Mbps by 2015 and higher speeds of atleast 100 Mbps thereafter.
• Mission is to have special coverage of Remote, Rural areas across India.
• Protect consumer interest by promoting informed consent, transparency and accountability in quality of service, tariff, usage etc.
• Optimize transmission of services to consumers irrespective of their devices or locations by Fixed-Mobile Convergence thus making available valuable spectrum for other wireless services.
• Convergence of services will cover voice, data, video, Internet, VAS
•  Cloud Computing, Next Generation Network including IPV6
• De-link licenses issuances & spectrum allocations
• Spectrum to be made available at market valuations
• Seek TRAI recommendation on license framework
• Will allow trading, sharing, pooling of spectrum
• Will enact a separate spectrum act