Reliance Jio just won another battle against the top three
telecom providers – Vodafone, Airtel and Idea. The Telcom
Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) has ruled that
the three providers should pay Reliance Jio a sum of Rs 3,050
crore for not providing adequate point-to-point connectivity.
The big three argued that congestion in networks was on account
of the free calls from the Jio network, but TRAI did not
buy this line. TRAI had been investigating charges levelled by
Jio that the big three ganged up to block its services. TRAI had
concluded that congestion level was as high as 96 per cent
against the permissible limit of 0.5 per cent. For call drops,
the failure should not be more than two per cent. However,
TRAI arrived at its conclusions based on data for three days
which appears to be too small a sample. While the date certainly
shows high congestion levels, there is still no evidence
to prove that this is being deliberately done. TRAI should have
also examined if free services gifted by Jio were creating the
congestion before arriving at a conclusion.
