DTH bills surging? Here’s how to control the costs

New Delhi: Delhi-based Ashish Chugh, 51, recently took to microblogging site Twitter to express his disappointment with the increasing cost of watching television, ever since the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India’s (Trai) new channel pricing regulations have been implemented. The tweet garnered a lot of attention from other consumers who had similar complaints.

Effective 1 February 2019, Trai mandated that every channel should either be listed as free-to-air (FTA) or have a fixed maximum retail price across all platforms. Every subscriber pays a flat ₹130 plus taxes as network capacity fee—the charge paid for the first 100 channels—every month. The 26 Doordarshan channels are FTA and will be broadcasted mandatorily. Note that you pay an additional ₹20 for every 25 channels you add beyond the 100 channels and each HD channel takes spectrum capacity worth two SD channels.