Roaming ADC irrational, says Bharti Tele

Bharti Tele-Ventures, which offers cellular services inder the brandname Airtel, today termed the regulator's move to impose access deficit charge (ADC) on calls made by subscribers while on roaming to Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd as 'irrational', and said that the deficit charge would be passed on to the subscribers.

'This is an irrational step and is equivalent to imposing a cess on roaming customers. We will appeal to the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) to reconsider the issue,' Sunil Bharti Mittal, chairman and group managing director, Bharti Tele-Ventures told reporters.

On Monday, the regulator had directed that customers on national roaming would have the pay an ADC of Rs 0.30 per mintue, while a subscriber on internatioanl roaming would pay Rs 3.25 per minute per minute.

Replying to a query, Mittal said that the company's investments for the year would be well over Rs 3,500 crores.

'Currently, we have about 10,000 base stations in the country. Over the next 12 months we propose to do what we did during the last 10 years "" set up an additional 10,000 base stations,' he said.

At present, Bharti Tele-Ventures has over 11 million subscribers. While Mittal did not specify any particular time frame, he added that the company was focussed to increase its subscriber base to 50 million.

On fixed line services, he said that Bharti would soon offer the same in all the 23 circles.

The company is all set to launch its services in Assam on Wednesday. 'This will give us an all-India footprint and we will be the only service who is present in all the 23 telecom circles,' Mittal said.

The formal lauch of Airtel's all India celebration would kick off in Guwahati with a call to the Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh,' Mittal added.

To commemorate the event, the company would be launching a nation-wide 'One India Challenge' car rally for amateur drivers. The rally would be flagged off from 23 cities, and after traversing the length and breadth of the country, all competing rallyists would first converge in Nagpur and finally reach Delhi as part of a grand finale, the company said.

'Participants from all the Indian states will form teams and drive through 23 telecom circle, 5200 towns, seven lakh villages for a combined prize money of Rs one core, the company added.