As per the latest post on The Financial Express, a major regulatory battle has ensued between incumbent operators like Bharti Airtel, Vodafone India and Idea Cellular on the one hand and Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Jio Infocomm, which is yet to commercially launch its services, on the other.
In a highlight :
The Cellular Operators Association of India (COAI), of which all four are members but is dominated by the first three, has written to the department of telecommunications secretary JS Deepak, complaining that Reliance Jio’s test launch services are nothing but full-fledged services in the guise of a trial run.
Here are the major points they are fighting upon :
- Reliance Jio is offering free services & connections calling it test services
- It has notched up 1.5 million users with average data consumption of 26 GB per month & voice usage of over 355 minutes
- COAI says Reliance Jio should file its tariff plans with Trai
- Huge traffic imbalance between outgoing calls from Reliance Jio’s network compared to incoming traffic
- Traffic imbalance between incumbents is only 1-2% vs 85-90% with Reliance Jio
- It chokes interconnect points of incumbent operators
