New Delhi: A war of words has broken out between existing telecom operators and newcomer Reliance Jio after their lobby group COAI called the latter’s testing of network a bypass of regulations, with the Mukesh Ambani firm hitting back saying the charge is a bid to block its rollout.
The Cellular Operators Association of India (COAI), which has members including Bharti Airtel, Idea and Vodafone, on August 8 wrote to the DoT demanding that Reliance Jio Infocomm Ltd (RJIL) or RJio immediately stop all connections provided to 1.5 million users because it had allegedly bypassed regulations by offering full-fledged services under the guise of test connections.
RJio on Wednesday hit back in a 8-page letter saying COAI charges were “malicious, unfounded, ill-informed, and frivolous and are contrary to actual facts” and was “promoting the vested interests of the incumbent dominant operators”.
A senior RJio official alleged telecom operators of “artificially and illegally” blocking its network in “an anti-competitive manner”. RJio said it is targeting to achieve over 100 million subscribers in a year and has been demanding to capacity in equipments to interconnect its services with network of other telecom operators. “RJIL has already extended the media to the other operators' premises at its own cost. However, the other operators, instead of augmenting the point of interconnections (PoIs), are blocking the POI augmentation, on various unreasonable grounds,” the company said in the letter.
It said due to insufficient interconnection, even the existing 15 lakh test users are experiencing 65 per cent call failures owing to congestion at PoIs. “It would clearly not be prudent (or compliant with the licence) for RJIL to contemplate launching of commercial services with this level of call failures,” the letter said. Jio said that it would not be advisable for it to launch commercial services, “as the same would result in quality of service issues, not just for RJIL subscribers”.
