The Hindu Business Line : Uniform call rates across country from January: Maran

THE Government today said the `IndiaOne' regime that entails a single call rate across the country would come into effect from January 2006. This would do away with the difference between local call charges and STD tariffs.

The Union Minister for Communications and IT, Mr Dayanidhi Maran, announced the timeframe for the new regime while inaugurating the second GSM equipment manufacturing facility of telecom PSU, ITI, in Rae Bareli.

"IndiaOne regime will come into effect from January next year. Calling within the country will be like calling within a State," Mr Maran said.

In June, the DoT had announced that calls between Chennai circle and Tamil Nadu circle, Kolkata-West Bengal and Mumbai-Maharashtra would be treated as local. Prior to the announcement, the calls between these three metro cities and their respective States and the two circles of Uttar Pradesh were treated as long distance (STD) calls.

Mr Maran further said that 25 per cent of the 60 million lines GSM tender of BSNL will be reserved for the State-owned ITI Ltd.

The new facility of ITI has a capacity to manufacture equipment that would support a capacity of three million GSM lines a year.The second facility comes months after the inauguration of the first unit in Mankapur, which has a capacity of four million lines.

The Minister said that efforts were on to bring in technology such that the Bangalore unit of ITI could get into CDMA manufacturing, while adding that expressions of interest for providing technology for CDMA for ITI would be called in December.

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