The interconnection dispute between Reliance Jio and incumbent operators like Idea Cellular, Vodafone and Bharti Airtel has been “largely resolved,” an official with one of the incumbent operators said.
“We have provided enough points to avoid any congestion-related problems in the foreseeable future,” said an official with one of the three incumbents.
According to the source, the percentage of calls failures would have fallen to 15% or less already, and will approach the 0% mark in “less than a week.”
The claim could not be verified due to a lag in the data that Jio shares on congestion-related failures.
The latest data that the Reliance Industries’ company has provided dates back to Oct 28, which is 11 days ago. At the time, 40% of the calls were being dropped at the point of interconnection.
However, a simple testing carried out by RTN seem to bear out the claim.
None of the 10 calls we attempted across carriers and circles from a Jio connection failed to go through. Two weeks ago, at least half of them would have failed.
TOUGH LOVE
The resolution of the dispute comes after Jio complained against three operators to the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India, which subsequently recommended penalties of Rs 3,050 cr to be imposed on the three operators.
This was followed by a meeting of the heads of these companies with the telecom minister, in which he said the government may be forced to take ‘abrasive’ action if they did not comply with license conditions.
This was followed by a referral of the matter to the Law Ministry for clarification on whether the government can impose punitive measures and to what extent such measures would be legally valid.
All this seems to have resulted in the resolution of the dispute.
WELCOME OFFER 2 [polldaddy poll=9574096]
With this, Reliance Jio is unlikely to extend its free Welcome Offer beyond Dec 31 for existing users.
However, it is likely to come up with a new offer on Dec 3, but that will be restricted to new users who join on or after that date.
The current Welcome Offer ends has validity that ends on Dec 3, as all promotional plans and schemes cannot be valid for more than 90 days.
The resolution of the dispute is likely to come as a big disappointment to a section of the population who were hoping to continue to use free data services for another three months.
On the other hand, with the interconnect problem solved, users would now be able to make unlimited calls to any phone number in India using RJio SIM cards.