The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) on Wednesday formally dropped plans to implement the much-awaited carrier access code (CAC), which allows telecom subscribers to choose long distance carriers of their choice. Trai, instead, stated that consumers could exercise such choice by virtual calling cards, which the operators would be required to interconnect. While this was already in force under its earlier Intelligent Network (IN) regulation, it has now been extended to stand-alone NLD/ILD operators, who can now directly sell such calling cards to the customers.
The Financial Express on Tuesday had reported about Trai?s plans to drop CAC as it had outlived its relevance with declining STD/ISD tariffs.
Until now only the unified access service licence (UASL) holders, such as Bharti Airtel, Vodafone Essar, BSNL, Reliance Comm, MTNL and Idea, could sell the virtual calling cards to customers. With the new regulation coming into force, standalone NLD/ILD operators like PowerGrid, AT&T can also sell VCCs directly to the consumers and the access providers would have to interconnect them with their networks.
The dropping of CAC is expected to bring a sigh of relief to the service providers who were dead against the move as it would have required them to invest over Rs 2,500 crore in network upgrade.
Service providers were of the view that with long distance tariffs dropping significantly (from a high of Rs 10 per minute in 2001 to around Rs 1-1.30 per minute now) and with high competition in the segment, there was no need to implement CAC.
