TV cable consumers across the country will have to pay more for their monthly cable TV bills from the beginning of the New Year.
The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) has announced a 7 per cent increase in cable television subscription rates across the board. But there is also good news for set-top-box (STB) cable families or CAS (conditional access system) subscribers, with the regulator reducing STBs rentals effective January 1, 2009.
The impact is that consumers will have to pay an additional Rs 0.35 paise more per month per pay channel in CAS areas. This means, each pay channel will now cost Rs 5.35 as against Rs 5 at present. Besides, if you are subscribing to only the basis free channels (without any pay channels), your monthly bill will increase to Rs 82 compared to the current Rs 77.
The minimum cable fee for CAS areas have also been hiked to Rs 82. CAS areas include parts of Delhi, Mumbai and Kolkata and the whole of Chennai. Here, television viewers can access pay channels only in the digital format, which means they should either take up a set-top-box or a direct-to-home (DTH) connections provided by players such as Dish TV, Tata Sky, Big TV, Sun TV amongst others. The rest of India is classified as non-CAS.
The good news is that TRAI has also mandated a reduction in STB prices, and the new rates come in two schemes and consumers can opt for either. The first offers lower security deposit (Rs 200, down from the earlier Rs 250) and monthly rental of Rs 34 from the earlier Rs 45. The second offers higher security and lower monthly rentals. Under this scheme, the security deposit is now down to Rs 750 instead of Rs 999, for a monthly fee of Rs 22 (instead of Rs 30).
This would mean that the ceiling that the telecom and broadcast regulator had earlier imposed would now be revised based on the number of paid television channels in different parts of the country.
If you are living in one of the big metros and their satellite cities like Chennai, Bangalore, Kolkata or non-CAS regions of Delhi and Mumbai you would now have to pay Rs 171-278 depending on the number of paid channels.
Apart from the metros, the X Class includes cities like Ahmedabad, Faridabad, Ghaziabad, Gurgaon, Hyderabad, Jaipur, Kanpur, Lucknow, Nagpur, Noida, Pune and Surat. In smaller cities and state capitals like Agra, Aligarh, Ludhiana or Vishakapatnam, your cable bill will now be Rs 150- 235.
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