Bharti Airtel has sought government's nod to re-introduce two of its services -- subscriber local dialling and Airtel-2-in-1 plan which the operator was earlier asked to withdraw for failing to meet the licence conditions and pay penalty.
Airtel 2-in-1 launched in Delhi was useful for users who want to control their STD/ISD spend by tying it with a prepaid account. This allowed them to make long distance calls without paying any security deposits. The violation was that dialling # (hash) and 'X' distorts the monitoring process carried out by the government as such numbers are difficult to be recorded.
Hutch was also penalised for starting a similar service, TalkOn. The Airtel 2-in-1 service and Hutch's TalkOn entailed prefixing of '# X' by a post-paid subscriber to use a separate pre-paid account for making STD/ISD calls from the same number.
Though the usage of special characters such as ', #, $ ' etc was permitted from subscriber's terminals within the network of access providers for provisioning of intra-network value added services or accessing of high speed data services since May 23, 2006, DoT noted that the violation by the companies was prior to the date.
DoT noted that these companies did not stop the services immediately after they had been issued a letter to stop in November 2005.
