TRAI move will hit landline users hard

BANGALORE: TRAI''s decision to hike basic telephone tariffs and cut free calls has hit telecom users like a double whammy.
No one is looking forward to his April telephone bill and many have been left wondering whether using cell phones will in fact be a cheaper alternative.
The worst hit will of course be those who are still not mobile.
Consider this.The average monthly mobile bill for subscribers in the executive category was around Rs 900. Last week''s decision to make mobileto-mobile incoming calls free should prune this bill by at least around Rs 100.
Now, with TRAI deciding to make all incoming calls from landline to mobile free, that bill could dip by a further Rs 500. Not surprisingly, AirTel CEO (South central) Jagdish Kini, is elated.
Said Kini: "We are expecting a big boom and expansion in the cellular market now. The customers are going to get valuable service for an affordable price.
They had been complaining about having to pay for incoming calls. People are going to prefer mobiles to landlines because it is not only going to be cheaper than landline, but accessible anywhere."
BSNL''s average household bill is around Rs 800 to Rs 1,000. Add to that Rs 100 that comes with TRAI upwardly revising fixed lines charges by around 12 per cent, and it is clear that high-end land-line users will be badly hit.
"The TRAI decision to make incoming calls on mobiles free is redundant. The move was driven more by market forces," says Somasekhar V.K, Managing Trustee of Grahak Shakti, a consumer forum in Bangalore.
"The move on basic telephony is definitely going to hurt the common man. With cable TV and electricity tariffs going up recently, consumers will really feel the heat."
Condemning the TRAI decision, Bangalore Telephone Customers'' Forum President V.S.Mohan Kumar says: "The move will hit the middle class hard."