MTNL to offer free roaming scheme and one month free broadband for landline customers

Following the footsteps of BSNL, state owned telecom MTNL has announced plans to offer free roaming, to enable subscribers free roaming when they travel across the country.

This is in keeping with the government's goal to achieve free national roaming, as announced by the ministry of telecom.

MTNL has also announced that it has increased the minimum broadband scheme to 2 Mbps and is offering its landline customers free broadband for one month.

In May 2015, the two state-owned telecom companies had announced unlimited free calling at night free local calling facility at night for their landline and broadband customers, to any network, across (See: MTNL, BSNL allow unlimited free calls during night).

While MTNL provides this facility between 10:00 pm and 7:00 am, BSNL provides it between 9:00 pm and 7:00 am.

Of the country's wire-line telephone base of 26.7 million, MTNL accounted for over 3.5 million subscribers, including 1.14 million wired broadband service subscribers, according data released by telecom regulator Trai in February.

As per latest TRAI data, BSNL which dominates the landline market had over 16.6 million landlines at the end of February.

The two state-run telcos had between them 201.1 million of the total 26.7 million fixed line connections, or 77.3 per cent of the market.