BSNL, Vodafone-Essar Cut Roaming Mobile-Call Tariffs

 NEW DELHI -- India's Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd. and Vodafone-Essar Ltd. Friday announced lower charges for mobile-phone calls made by subscribers from outside their home locations, intensifying a price war in the world's second-largest wireless-service market.
State-run Bharat Sanchar said post-paid users of its services will now pay the same for roaming calls made within India as they do for calls made from their home locations.
Vodafone-Essar, the Indian unit of U.K.'s Vodafone Group PLC, introduced tariff plans offering national roaming rates of 0.70 paise ($0.02) per minute and 0.15 rupees per second.
The move comes after Bharti Airtel Ltd., India's largest mobile-phone operator by subscribers, cut roaming rates by nearly 60%. Tata DoCoMo, a joint venture between India's Tata Teleservices Ltd. and Japan's NTT DoCoMo Inc., had earlier extended its pay-per-second billing plan to all its roaming customers.
Mobile-phone operators in India are cutting rates and launching per-second tariff plans to gain or keep market share, as new companies are gearing up to start services.
The moves to cut roaming rates come as the launch of mobile number portability is approaching. Under the system, subscribers can switch operators while retaining their numbers.
India's federal government has decided to implement number portability from Dec. 31 in some areas and expects to extend it across the nation by March 20.
India had some 488.40 million mobile phone users at the end of October.
BSNL also said it has launched per-second billing for its post-paid users. It had offered per-second billing plan only to its prepaid users earlie