The rivalry has taken to a new level. It seems the free unlimited voice calling plans of Reliance Jio has not gone well with rival telecom operators. So basically your calls from Jio to other networks won’t be getting connected that easily.
The Cellular Operators Association of India (COAI) has now written to the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) stating that incumbent telecom operators are not bound to give or don’t have adequate resources to provide interconnect points to Reliance Jio.
The reason they say is that existing telecom operators don’t have either the infrastructure and financial resources to terminate Jio’s massive volumes of voice traffic generated by its free voice calling offer. Those who may not know, the interconnect points are used to connect voice calls from one telecom network to another.
According to a letter written by COAI to the principal secretary at PMO “Unloading tsunamis of asymmetric incoming voice traffic from a (potential) 100 million Reliance Jio customers can lead to the weighted average voice realization of existing operators plunging from 30-40 paise per voice minute to 22-25 paise per voice minute or even lower”.
According to COAI Director General Rajan Mathews, “Reliance Jio may well make up some part of this massive voice cross-subsidy by way of data revenue realisations, by way of customer acquisitions/churn, but it becomes abundantly clear that the overwhelming burden of this free lunch is sought to be passed on to rival operators through tariff manipulations, which exploit the Interconnect Usage Charge (IUC) regime, and offload tsunamis of asymmetric voice traffic that will choke and financially destroy competition”.
If this issue continues then it may cause serious trouble to Reliance Jio launch plans. Its subscribers won’t be able to make voice calls to another network, as currently, Jio is seeing a 65% call drop in its voice calls to other networks.
When we actually tried calling from out Jio connection to an Idea and Airtel numbers, most of the time the “line was busy” and call only got connected after a few tries.