Reliance Jio says telecoms violating MNP norms

Jio 4G Wi-Fi
Reliance Jio has sought the industry watchdog TRAI’s intervention over the three main telecom operators — Airtel, Vodafone and Idea — refusing to allow porting of their subscribers to its own network, in an alleged disregard to licensing norms.

“Reliance Jio Infocomm, vide letters dated September 2, 2016, sent individually to Bharti Airtel, Idea and Vodafone, who are the incumbent dominant operators, informing them that Reliance Jio would be commencing its services from September 5,” the company said in its letter.

“In spite of being under legal and contractual obligation to port the numbers after a valid request is made, the incumbent dominant operators have rejected all the requests made for porting between Sep 5 to Sep 12,” said the letter to the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI).

The letter said against 201 total requests made to the three operators — to Airtel the most, followed by Idea and then Vodafone — 161 of them have violated the contractual obligations and eight were subject to wrong coding, among other issues.

None were successfully completed, it said, and elaborated upon the portability regulations.

“Please note that these rejections are in addition to the rejection of mobile number portability request of 4,919 corporate mobile numbers issued to employees and members of Reliance Industries Group by Bharti Airtel in August 2016,” it said.

“Reliance Jio sincerely requests that the TRAI take serious cognizance of this complaint and intervene by taking strict action against incumbent dominant operators under the relevant provisions of the mobile number portability regulations and the unified licence,” it said.

The letter comes just as the incumbent operators and Reliance Jio appeared to be in the process of settling their differences over providing enough points of inter-connect for calls from the latter’s network to go through to their own subscribers.

Vodafone supports Jio

Vodafone India on Thursday said it had decided to increase its points of interconnect (PoI) with Reliance Jio three-fold.

“Vodafone India has always provided the PoI to other operators for all their fair, reasonable and legitimate requirements and will continue to do so,” a company statement here said.

“Following guidance from the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) and clarifications from Jio regarding its commercial launch, Vodafone India has decided to increase its POI with Jio three-fold and accordingly increase the capacity to connect. Vodafone is hopeful that all issues it has raised with TRAI and Jio will be duly considered and resolved at the earliest,” the statement added.

Earlier, Jio said that interconnection points provided by other operators were not sufficient.

“Based on industry practice, 12,500 E1 ports (interconnect points, with technical parameters) are required for 22 million subscribers, details of which have been provided to the members of Cellular Operators’ Association of India,” said a Reliance Industries statement on August 18.

“As against this, the top three operators have released only 1,400 ports so far,” the company said.

A rough calculation suggests that Jio, as per the above-mentioned figures, would need a little over 8,500 ports given a subscriber base of 15 million.

Reliance Jio had officially launched its services on September 5.