Reliance Jio, Airtel, and Vodafone are ordered by TRAI to submit call traffic information

In order to study the traffic patterns on their networks, The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) has ordered Bharti Airtel, Vodafone, Reliance Jio, BSNL, and MTNL to provide call details by September 16.

“Trai has asked telecom operators to submit traffic details for the purpose of examining them under the interconnection usage paper. Airtel, Vodafone, Jio and public sector firms did not submit even after the reminder. Therefore, Trai issued orders for them. They have to submit data by September 16,” a source told the news source.

This order could aid the regulator in analysing claims made by RIL group companies against incumbents over interconnection issues. After receiving a complaint from the Cellular Operators Association of India (COAI) on BSNL's service, which permitted its subscribers to make both mobile and landline calls via a mobile app, TRAI released a discussion paper on August 5th to examine IUC regulations.

According to COAI, the offer violates the licensing norms as well as interconnect pacts. The data will be helpful for Trai to examine the more recent allegations by Reliance Jio against incumbent telecom operators — Airtel, Vodafone and Idea Cellular. The allegation against these companies was that they were not providing proper interconnection for its service.

Interconnection is required to enable mobile users to make calls to customers of other telecom networks.  

An inter-connection usage charge (IUC) has been levied by a mobile operator for each incoming call it gets from a subscriber of another network. The BSNL service launch has been put on hold by the regulator till the matter is resolved.

Separately, Reliance Jio, which commercially launched its services on 5 September, has accused the incumbent players of not releasing sufficient inter-connection ports which is leading to call drops.

Incumbents have alleged that free calling service being offered by Jio is leading to huge incoming traffic on their network due to which they have to incur huge cost and services of their customers may be adversely impacted.

Last week, Airtel requested the regulator to find a solution to curb the “massive asymmetric traffic” and ensure that receiving networks are not “abused by tsunami of free traffic” from Reliance Jio."

The allegation has been rejected by Jio saying that the outgoing traffic is less than two calls per customer per hour even during peak traffic and these calls are not to one operator but distributed over all the operators.

Jio has alleged that 75% of calls made from its network, with most of them on incumbents network, are failing due to insufficient interconnection ports provided by service providers.