Jio asks TRAI to ensure it gets to connect with existing telcos

NEW DELHI: Mukesh Ambani-led Reliance Industries Ltd (RIL) has written another letter to the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI), requesting directives

NEW DELHI: Mukesh Ambani-led Reliance Industries Ltd (RIL) has written another letter to the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI), requesting directives to existing telcos to immediately provide inter-connection to its Jio 4G network with their own, in the spirit of the licencing agreements.

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It has also asked the telecom regulator to take action against those companies that delay such a provisioning of points of interconnect to Jio.

Quoting from licencing accords, Reliance Jio said in its letter to TRAI chairman RS Sharma that operators must extend requisite points of interconnect, of sufficient capacity and in sufficient numbers to ensure that calls are completed to all destinations.

The company said the current number of interconnect points being provided to Reliance Jio are far from adequate as the failure rate is in excess of 65%, resulting in more than 1.6 crore call failures per day between Reliance Jio and the networks of Airtel, Vodafone and Idea.

“Such unequivocal denial to provide points of interconnect for interconnection to Reliance Jio is in blatant breach of the licence agreement,” it said.

On August 12, chief executives of top mobile companies, under the umbrella of the Cellular Operators’ Association of India (COAI), called on IT minister Manoj Sinha to express concerns over alleged favour it ism towards new players in the sector. The meeting came a day after a rather unprecedented move, wherein the association even wrote to the Prime Minister’s Office, complaining about the industry watchdog and contending that some of its moves discriminated against existing players.