A SAARC citizen may pay between USD 0.31 and USD 3.29 to make a local call while roaming within the region. The highest cost is paid by Maldivian roaming in number of SAARC countries, and the lowest is for an Indian roaming in Maldives. Using a local pre-paid SIM from the visiting country to make a local off-net call is more cost effective. Instead of USD 3.29, the Maldivian roaming in Bangladesh would have to pay only USD 0.01 - 345 times less than the roaming tariff.
Some intra-SAARC international direct dial (IDD) tariffs were lowered in response to the 15th SAARC Summit directive. However none of the countries have a flat rate for their regional partners. Overall calling Maldives is high for both SAARC fixed line and mobile users. There are further instances where some countries (e.g. India) are favored over others and are offered better rates. Calling India from Sri Lanka costs USD 0.03 for fixed and USD 0.05 for mobile (the lowest in the region).
Even with these inconsistencies, it is still considerably cheaper for a user to make an international voice call home as opposed to a roaming call home. As illustrated in the figure below, an Indian user may pay up to 10.75 times more to make a call home, while roaming.
