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A fight which is getting heated up day by day will have to be resolved by authorities
Mukesh Ambani
Pascal Lauener / Reuters
Mukesh Ambani

Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) has called a meeting with leading telcos in the country namely Airtel, Vodafone, and Idea to resolve the Reliance Jio interconnection issue.

During the commercial launch of Jio Mukesh Ambani had pointed out that just in past one week Jio customers had 5 crore calls disconnections to the other networks as they have refused to provide interconnecting points.

While the Cellular Operators Association of India (COAI) where Jio is also a member has urged TRAI to have a meeting with all the members of the association.

"We believe that the issue pertains to all members of COAI and not limited to the three operators. We, therefore, request Trai to invite all members of COAI for this meeting," COAI said.

Rupak De Chowdhuri / Reuters

Meanwhile, the big 3 networks, Airtel, Vodafone, and Idea have been very vocal about Jio's unfair policy to attain customers under a so-called trial period. These mobile network providers have refused to provide interconnectivity points which are necessary for calls across the network.

They have stated the reason that Jio's customer base is choking their network capacity and the distribution of the bandwidth is unfair. Due to the lack of resources, the telcos have said that they are not bound to provide any assistance to Jio.

During Reliance's AGM, Ambani had appealed the telecom operators to help a newcomer in the market by providing support in terms of interconnecting points for a better and healthy competition in the mobile network space.

Reliance and other telcos both have written to the Department of Telecommunication (DoT) but it refused to take part in this citing that the matter comes under the jurisdiction of TRAI.

"Neither are they obliged to entertain interconnect requests which are derived from abnormally induced traffic patterns that game the interconnection usage charge (IUC) regime and are anti-competitive," COAI said in the letter to the PMO.

COAI has said that other telcos have provided 400 interconnection points on an average which are sufficient to handle 15-20 million customers.

According to PTI, Jio has submitted to Trai that it will need 12,727 network interconnection points for mobile services and 3,068 for STD call facility to start commercial services.

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This article exists as part of the online archive for HuffPost India, which closed in 2020. Some features are no longer enabled. If you have questions or concerns about this article, please contact indiasupport@huffpost.com.