Continuing its regulatory war against incumbent operators, Reliance Jio Infocomm on Tuesday wrote to the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai), urging it to ensure that it gets inter-connectivity to test its services and called for action against existing telecom companies for violating licensing conditions by denying its requests for additional points of inter-connection.
Reliance Jio Infocomm (RJIL), a unit of Reliance Industries, said absence of incumbent operators to provide it points of inter-connection (PoIs) — connection between their facilities, equipment and network — led to unusually high call failures during its beta run.
The Mukesh Ambani firm wrote to Trai Chairman R S Sharma stating the dominant operators under the aegis of COAI have categorically mentioned that its member operators (which incidentally include Bharti Airtel, Vodafone and Idea) shall not be expected to provide PoIs to RJIL during the test trials.
The licence agreement provides for obligation of the licensee to provide inter-connection facilities to other licensees.
The company said it is following payment terms for such inter-connection and inter-connection usage charge (IUC) set by Trai in respect to test users.
Arguing that inter-connection between service providers is the basis of a telecom network, Reliance Jio said it is necessary that requisite PoIs, which are required to maintain minimum quality of service to ensure calls are completed to all destinations, must be unconditionally facilitated inter se between all operators, subject alone to payment of relevant IUC charges.
It also expressed concern that this situation will only get worse without expediting the requisite PoI augmentation.
Reliance Jio submitted that there was no legal or any other basis for the operators to deny or even delay the provisioning of PoIs for inter-connection.
It asked Trai to immediately direct the operators, including members of COAI, to provide PoIs to Reliance Jio without any demur or delay.
By Baishakhi Dutta
