“COAI has been kept out of the TRAI meeting at the insistence of RIL Jio, and TRAI acquiesced to their demand in an unprecedented manner”, COAI Director General Rajan S Mathews said.
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So clearly since COAI was representing the industry and bringing these issues via our correspondent and that correspondent was specifically mentioned in the letter, it was rather surprising that TRAI to the Reliance Jio objection.
“Neither are they obliged to entertain interconnect requests which are derived from abnormally induced traffic patterns that game the interconnection usage charge (IUC) regime and are anti-competitive”, COAI said in the letter to the PMO.
Reliance Jio Infocomm Board Member Mahendra Nahata has termed the company’s fight for interconnectivity as “fight for justice and fight for customers”.
According to Mathews, the true cost of facilitating interconnection in the case of Reliance Jio works out to about 30 paise, given the “asymmetrical” nature of volumes generating from it. “.Not just Reliance Jio customers or Airtel or Vodafone but for all Indian customers”, Nahata said after a meeting with TRAI.
“Trai is meeting telecom operators tomorrow on the inter-connection issue”, an official source said to PTI.
At a meeting where representatives of both sides met the regulator, the latter told attendees that the matter of points of interconnection (PoI) should first be settled bilaterally, failing which an adjudicator be appointed.
“As a responsible company, Bharti Airtel has always provided Points-of-Interconnect to other operators and is fully compliant with all regulatory guidelines and licence conditions”.
“None of the new operators who launched services in the last few years, has faced any PoI related issues with Airtel”, it pointed out. “The asymmetry of call traffic originating from Jio’s network, the number of PoIs needed, the nature of freebies that is giving and whether its preview launch should be considered launch of commercial services”, he said. “In the interim, we continue with our efforts to augment the hundreds of PoIs already given to Reliance Jio, as per the bilateral agreement, so that customers are not inconvenienced”, the company added.
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Further, the incumbent denied to give any extra points of interconnect to Jio stating that the traffic imbalance emerging through Jio’s network was harming their networks. Once Reliance Jio marches beyond its 100 million subscribers, and as such subscribers become accustomed to the unlimited free service, the ratio will undoubted head towards 15:1. “This is reflected in the experience in the field where over 65 per cent of calls to networks of the top 3 operators are failing today”, said the Jio statement.
