Mumbai, September 8: With hundreds of customers on Reliance Jio’s new 4G
network facing disruption in service due to lack of adequate
interconnection with incumbent operators, telecom regulator TRAI has
called Airtel, Idea Cellular, Vodafone and Reliance Jio for a meeting on
Friday.
The point of interconnection is the physical
place where two networks connect with each other. This is required so
that there is seamless communication when a user of one operator calls a
user of another operator.
Reliance Jio had written
to the Department of Telecom and the TRAI seeking action against the
incumbent operators for not giving adequate number of interconnection
points. Reliance had said that its quality of service to consumers was
suffering due to this issue.
Crores of calls made by
RJio customers to users of another operator are not going getting
completed. Similarly, users of other operators are finding it difficult
to get through to RJio customers.
Under the licence
conditions, operators are required to offer interconnection to each
other. TRAI has set a cap of 14 paise as the interconnection charge,
which means that operators on whose network the call originates have to
pay that fee to the operator on whose network the call terminates.
However, incumbent operators have refused to give interconnection.
Initially,
the operators said that they could not release more interconnection
because RJio was allegedly bypassing regulations by offering
full-fledged services under the guise of test connections. Now that RJio
has launched its commercial services, the incumbent operators say that
the free voice calls being offered by the new operator were leading to
congestion on their networks.
The Cellular Operators
Association of India, representing incumbent operators Airtel, Vodafone
and Idea, said that giving interconnections to RJio would be
economically unviable and would lead to huge erosion of revenue for the
operators.
“Instead of augmenting the POIs, other
operators are blocking the POI augmentation on various unreasonable
grounds,” RJio said in a letter to DoT recently. On Wednesday, the DoT
had washed its hands of the issue saying that this was under the domain
of the TRAI.
Interestingly, a similar dispute had
arisen several years ago when the current incumbent operators were small
players. Back then it was BSNL, which was the big incumbent and had
refused interconnection to the likes of Airtel.
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