Interconnection row: telecom regulator summons incumbent operators, RJio

With hundreds of customers on Reliance Jio’s new 4G network facing disruption in service due to lack of adequate interconnection with incumbent operators, telecom regulator TRAI has called Airtel, Idea Cellular, Vodafone and Reliance Jio for a meeting on Friday.

The point of interconnection is the physical place where two networks connect with each other. This is required so that there is seamless communication when a user of one operator calls a user of another operator.

Reliance Jio had written to the Department of Telecom and the TRAI seeking action against the incumbent operators for not giving adequate number of interconnection points. Reliance had said that its quality of service to consumers was suffering due to this issue.

Crores of calls made by RJio customers to users of another operator are not going getting completed. Similarly, users of other operators are finding it difficult to get through to RJio customers.

Under the licence conditions, operators are required to offer interconnection to each other. TRAI has set a cap of 14 paise as the interconnection charge, which means that operators on whose network the call originates have to pay that fee to the operator on whose network the call terminates. However, incumbent operators have refused to give interconnection.

Initially, the operators said that they could not release more interconnection 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 their networks.

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

“Instead of augmenting the POIs, other operators are blocking the POI augmentation on various unreasonable grounds,” RJio said in a letter to DoT recently. On Wednesday, the DoT had washed its hands of the issue saying that this was under the domain of the TRAI.

Interestingly, a similar dispute had arisen several years ago when the current incumbent operators were small players. Back then it was BSNL, which was the big incumbent and had refused interconnection to the likes of Airtel.