Similarly, Airtel said that it will be providing additional points of interconnect to handle calls from Reliance Jio.
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Reliance Jio has sought the industry watchdog’s intervention over the three main telecom operators – Airtel, Vodafone and Idea – refusing to allow porting of their subscribers to its network, in an alleged disregard to licensing norms. The situation has been same on Airtel’s network as well, recording more than 75 failed calls out of every 100 call attempts. Again, Jio is in the process of taking up additional interconnection points from rival operators and the speed issue too should be sorted out soon.
A Vodafone India spokesperson said, “The issue of MNP was sorted in the meeting with Trai along with Point of Interconnections”. Bharti, the largest mobile operator in India commands a market share of 24.71 per cent, followed by Vodafone (19.26 per cent) and Idea (17.03 per cent), as on June 2016. Airtel had said that it will also increase interconnection to support 15 million subscribers. The ratings agency further said that the company’s tariff plans will have a significant impact on RIL’s cash reserves and that the positive Ebitdar will be generated at a lower average revenue per user. While RJIL has rolled out a state-of-the-art network, the benefits of superior voice technology have been denied to Indian customers due to the POI congestion.
“The quantum of POIs proposed to be released by Vodafone as per its press release is substantially less than the requirement estimated based on transparent workings shared with Vodafone”, it said in a statement.
Vodafone is planning an up to $3-billion (Rs 20,100-crore) equity infusion in its India unit to replace debt as competition intensifies with the entry of Reliance Jio Infocomm and bidding for spectrum gets underway in less than a month.
RJIL also alleges that the incumbent telecom operators are also discouraging their subscribers to port to Jio by blocking their MNP facility. “Indian customers have not been able to enjoy RJIL’s free voice offer as a result of such anti-competitive behaviour of incumbent operators”, RJIL complains.
None were successfully completed, it said, and elaborated upon the portability regulations. Jio added that this is a clear and deliberate breach of the license conditions.
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Vodafone is one of India’s leading telecom service providers, a co-creator of the telecom ecosystem, and a catalyst of the telecom revolution in India. RJIL said it hopes that Vodafone will enhance the PoIs sufficiently to meet its license obligation of QoS with immediate effect and maintain these parameters on an ongoing basis.
