New Delhi, Feb. 27: India's No. 1 mobile player Bharti Airtel today announced free national roaming, just a week after fierce rival Reliance Jio offered a similar facility to its customers.

Airtel also slashed global roaming rates by 90 per cent as part of its efforts to retain its customer base of 368 million in the face of price wars and consolidation moves in a highly competitive industry.

Sunil Bharti Mittal, chairman of Bharti Airtel, said: "We are changing the international roaming paradigm, which will allow our customers to take their number to every corner of the world. As an industry, operators across the world must collaborate to remove the cost barrier to roaming and offer customers the convenience of staying connected without the fear of exorbitant bill charges."

Airtel today announced the removal of all roaming charges for outgoing and incoming calls as well as SMS and data use within India from April. Home data packs for customers will apply even while they roam across the country.

"This marks the death of national roaming and the whole country will now be like a local network for our customers, who will not have to think twice before making or receiving calls or using data while travelling outside their home base," added Gopal Vittal, chief executive of Bharti Airtel.

Airtel officials said the cuts will not impact revenue as they expect volumes to go up.

In the October-December quarter of 2016, Airtel's overall (voice and data) average revenue per user (ARPU) fell to Rs 172 from Rs 188 in the preceding quarter and Rs 193 in the year-ago period.

Separately, data ARPU declined 13 per cent to Rs 175 from Rs 201 in the preceding quarter, while voice ARPU fell in the same quarter to Rs 123 from Rs 132 in the September quarter.

"This trend of greater volumes will be pronounced in the global calling business ... till now most customers would leave their mobile numbers and take local numbers or global calling cards ... with these slashes we expect people to carry their local number abroad," said officials.

International rates

Airtel said that from April, it will be slashing rates on international roaming and customers without any international roaming packs will be billed on the basis of automatic adjustment that is equal to the daily pack for that particular country.

"This means the moment a customer's billing reaches the price of a one-day pack for the country, he/she will be automatically moved to that pack. This will allow our customers to use their devices abroad without any fear," the company said.

This essentially means that if a customer travelling to the US without a pack hits the threshold of Rs 649 (the price of the one-day pack for the US), he/she will automatically move to the one-day pack with free incoming calls/SMS, 100 India and local country outgoing minutes, 300 MB data and a host of other benefits. Similarly, a customer travelling to Singapore will move to the one-day pack the moment he hits the Rs 499-mark.

An Airtel release said the company had already launched innovative and affordable international roaming packs for major countries.

Call charges have been reduced in these roaming packs by up to 90 per cent to as low as Rs 3/minutes and data charges by up to 99 per cent to Rs 3/MB across popular roaming destinations.