Airtel & Vodafone to Open Up Reliance Jio Calls, But Only in 2017
Telecom operators are expected to ease up the network points to let through calls made from Jio.
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The ongoing rivalry in the telecom industry between existing players and Reliance Jio seems to working out its own course. Earlier on Friday, Airtel urged Trai to engage on the subject of a fair IUC regime and ensure that the practice of pricing is in compliance with Telecom Tariff Order, which requires tariffs to be “IUC compliant, non-predatory and non-discriminatory”.
It is said that Jio has submitted to Trai that it will need 12,727 network inter-connection points for mobile services and 3,068 for STD call facility to start commercial services.
But the ground reality tells us that less 4 percent of the required ports in the first year have been offered up till now. This is the primary reason for over 65 percent call drops on Jio network.
Jio has said that it is paying interconnection charges to telecom operators for each call made its customer on respective networks but COAI has contested that the charges set by Trai at 14 paise for a mobile incoming is very low and it should be increased to about 31-32 paise to maintain balance.
The Reliance-owned telecom division has requested Trai to take action against incumbent telecom operators for purportedly denying adequate capacity leading to call failures in its network during the trial run.
Responding to Jio’s claims, Rajan S Mathews, Director, COAI has said that incumbents will consider 5th September as date of request from Jio to seek PoI as their earlier request was made during trial period.
He further added that Jio has to talk one-on-one to each operator to get “reasonable number” of PoIs and the number of PoI sought by it earlier as on date is too high.
All this could possibly mean that the inter-connectivity points as desired by Jio will be offered, but only after they start operating financially, which doesn’t happen before 1 January 2017.