The Department of Telecom has informed Reliance Jio that it will not intervene in its dispute with incumbent players over interconnection.

The DoT said the issue of interconnection falls within the purview of the telecom regulator or should be settled mutually between operators.

Reliance Jio had written to the DoT seeking action against incumbent operators for not giving an adequate number of interconnection points.

Reliance had said that its quality of service to consumers was suffering due to this issue. Point of interconnection is the physical point where two networks connect. This is required for seamless communication when one operator’s user calls another operator’s user.

According to RJio, it is targeting 100 million subscribers, for which it had approached existing operators seeking adequate number of interconnect points. “Instead of augmenting the PoIs, other operators are blocking the PoI augmentation on various unreasonable grounds,” RJio said in a letter to DoT.

However, incumbent operators have so far refused to give these points of interconnection. Initially, the operators said that they could not release more interconnections because RJio was allegedly bypassing regulations by offering full-fledged services under the guise of test connections.

Now that RJio has launched its commercial services, the incumbent operators say that the free voice calls being offered by the new operator were leading to congestion on the network.

The Cellular Operators Association of India, representing incumbent operators Airtel, Vodafone and Idea, said that giving interconnection to RJio would be economically unviable and would lead to huge erosion of revenue for the operators.

Now, with the DoT washing its hands of the issue, the ball is in TRAI’s court.

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