New Delhi : Levelling charges against Trai of “tilting the playing field” and newcomer Reliance Jio of bypassing regulations, existing operators’ body COAI has sought meetings with the Prime Minister’s Office as well as the Telecom Minister to raise these issues with them.
It has been up in arms against Trai’s consultation paper on call connect charges calling the move “unfair on incumbent operators”, and has questioned the regulator’s urgency in initiating the process of interconnect review, claiming that it “favours new entrants”. “We will meet Secretary, Department of Telecom (DoT), JS Deepak tomorrow. We will highlight the issue that we see Trai’s opinion tilting the playing field,” COAI Director General Rajan S Mathews told PTI. “DoT as a licensor is responsible for ensuring level playing field… In this context, we will also be taking up our concerns related to RJio,” he added.
He said the Cellular Operators Association of India (COAI) has also sought a meeting with the Telecom Minister Manoj Sinha, and the PMO to highlight the matter but it is yet to hear from them. A war of words has broken out between existing telecom operators and Reliance Jio after COAI called the latter’s testing of network a bypass of regulations, with the Mukesh Ambani firm hitting back saying the charge is a bid to block its rollout. COAI, which has members including Bharti Airtel, Idea and Vodafone, on August 8 wrote to the Department of Telecom (DoT) demanding that Rel Jio Infocomm Ltd (RJIL) or RJio immediately stop all connections provided to 1.5 million users because it had allegedly bypassed regulations by offering full-fledged services under the guise of test connections.
