Rajan Mathews, director general of COAI, said: "We asked for clarity on whether this is compliant with regulations, as 1.5 million subscribers are tantamount to a commercial launch as the trial period has been extended yet again and networks of our operators are getting choked."
Jio had launched trial services last December and its users are consuming 25-30 times more data than the Indian average, because the services are free. Even though Jio is still in the trial phase, rivals alleged that it is trying to port their subscribers.
Clearly, the extension of free services is beginning to hurt incumbents in more ways than one. In its letter to DoT, COAI has said: "this is no test. This is the provisioning of full-blown and full-fledged services, masquerading as tests, which bypass regulations and can potentially game policy features like the IUC (Interconnection Usage Charges) regime, non-predatory pricing and fair competition etc."
War started. Reliance jio already overtaken Airtel,Voda,Idea in terms of Data carrying capacity even before launch which hurts all telcos so much that they cannot digest their poor Q1 results :lol