TRAI Didn’t Allow COAI For Telco Meeting On Jio Pressure : Mathews

As regulator Trai called the warring telecos to discuss contentious interconnect issue, cellular operators body COAI on Friday said incumbent players have agreed to discuss and negotiate “reasonable” points of connectivity that can be provided to entrant Reliance Jio. “There is no time frame indicated by the Trai”, he said. Trai said that as the issue involved bilateral arrangement between telecom service providers “naturally neither COAI nor any other association was invited for this meeting”.

The incumbents have been refusing to give more interconnection points to Reliance Jio saying that allowing Jio customers to make as many calls as they want will hit their profit levels.

The Cellular Operators Association of India yesterday, wrote to Trai that the meeting scheduled for Friday, where in Airtel, Vodafone and Idea, have been called for discussing the issue, pertains to all members and not just the three telcos.

In the same letter, COAI says any attempt to reduce or scrap the IUC would also affect realisation of incumbents and could take them to the brink of liquidation.

The meeting was convened to iron out the issue of interconnection where Reliance Jio has accused other telcos not proving it enough interconnection points.

In a statement, COAI Director General Rajan S Mathews declared that the industry lobby was “kept out of the TRAI meeting at the insistence of Reliance Jio and TRAI acquiesced to their demand, in an unprecedented manner”.

Although Reliance Jio did not issue a statement, its representative, Mahendra Nahata, who attended the meeting, told reporters the company had asked for “the right number of connect, right quantum of interconnection”. However, officials from industry body COAI were not allowed to attend the meeting.

“In this regard, Interconnection Usage Charges is an effective tool in the hands of Trai, which we hope they will use judiciously”, Bharti Airtel said in a statement. Another said Mathews shouldn’t have gone since only specific telcos were invited, and no association members.

“Therefore we request Trai to invite all members of COAI for the said meeting”, COAI letter to Trai said. “While it is the COAI, its view is actually the view of one or two operators and not the view of the entire industry”.

It is learnt that the service providers have made a decision to meet soon and discuss interconnect issues among themselves and specify the number of Points-of-Interconnect (PoI) each has to provide to Reliance Jio. While Reliance Jio Infocomm, too, was a member of COAI, he said, “We have zero revenue, so we are crowded out”.

Apart from the issue of asymmetrical traffic, incumbents also brought up the issue of whether RJio’s free-voice calls were even legal and alleged they were predatory under the Trai’s definition.