Airtel does not buy Reliance Jio’s “Welcome Offer”. TRAI meeting telcos tomorrow.

India’s major telecom operators, Airtel, Idea, Vodafone along with new entrant Reliance Jio will be meeting with the telecom regulator tomorrow after days of infighting. The telcos clashed mainly on the issue of ‘point of interconnect’ which essentially help operators to connect calls from one operator’s network to other. Even after the launch of Mukesh Ambani owned Reliance Jio services, this matter remains unresolved. In the days leading to the announcement of Jio services, the telecom industry saw one of the biggest slugfest between the incumbent telecom operators and Reliance Jio mainly on Jio’s long running free test trial and points of interconnection. It looks like the TRAI has decided call the telcos in and hear both sides of the story to try and end the never ending telco tussle.

There are many issues telcos are likely to discuss regarding Jio’s entry. Reliance Jio services were launched on the 5th of September after a pretty long test period that started from December 2015. While Jio has filed its tariff with the TRAI, Jio will continue to provide services for free under its “Welcome Offer” till the end of December 2016 and telecom operators are finding issues with the long running free trial testing. Telecom industry body, COAI says that the usual testing period for any operator is 90days and Jio has already exceeded its trial period. Apart from that Reliance Jio and the incumbent operators have been majorly sparring over points of interconnection where Jio has time and again asked operators for more interconnection capacity as telcos are obligated under license agreement and operators on the other side have said that they have already provided more than enough interconnect capacity to Jio to accommodate 15-20 million subscribers, much higher than the number of subscribers Jio currently has. And in terms of the tariff, as expected Jio rattled the industry with its tariff announcements when it made voice calls free and brought down data tariff to as low as Rs. 50 per 1GB and left the telcos struggling to match the numbers. All these matters are likely to be discussed with the telecom regulator tomorrow. Sources in the telecom department tell us that the DoT does not have issue with Jio’s free trial or the tariff plan as it is “TRAI’s domain”.

TRAI has only called the four operators, Airtel, Vodafone, Idea and Reliance Jio leaving out COAI and other telecom operators. However the COAI has written to the TRAI asking the regulator to include other players and the telecom industry body as the matter concerns all. We’ll have to wait and see if the TRAI will be able to finally help the long sparring telcos to reach some truce.

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