COAI Urges PM to ‘Restore Fair Competition’ Against Reliance Jio

Telecom operators’ body,COAI has written to the PMO seeking intervention on the issue to “restore fair competition”.

Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Jio Infocomm Ltd (RJIL). (Photo: PTI)

Continuing with its letter war against free-voice-call-provider Reliance Jio, the association of telecom operators like Airtel has told Prime Minister’s Office that incumbents are “not obliged to entertain interconnect requests” that are “anti-competitive”.

Telecom operators’ body, COAI has written to the PMO seeking its intervention on the issue to “restore fair competition”.

They (operators) wish to politely clarify that they are in no position, by way of network resources, or financial resources, to terminate volumes of traffic which are markedly asymmetric. Neither are they obliged to entertain interconnect requests which are derived from abnormal induced traffic patterns that game the IUC regime and are anti-competitive.

Reliance Jio, which commercially launched its services on 5 September, has accused incumbent players like Bharti Airtel and Vodafone of not releasing sufficient interconnection ports during its test run of services.

The existing operators (under the aegis of COAI) have contended that RJio’s testing of network was an effort to bypass regulations.

Speaking at the AGM of Reliance Industries, its chief Mukesh Ambani had said Reliance Jio customers suffered 5 crore call failures in the previous week to other networks due to insufficient interconnect capacity.

Referring to the free voice calls by RJio as a “free lunch”, COAI said RJio seeks to pass the “overwhelming burden” on to rival operators through tariff manipulations which “exploit and game the IUC regime”.