KOLKATA: India's top incumbent carriers have told the Prime Minister's Office (PMO) they are in no way obliged or in any position to entertain Reliance Jio Infocomm's requests for interconnection points as they do not have either the network or the financial resources to terminate the latter's humongous volumes of potentially asymmetric voice traffic.
"Unloading tsunamis of asymmetric incoming voice traffic from a (potential) 100 million Reliance Jio customers can lead to the weighted average voice realisation of existing operators plunging from 30-40 paise per voice minute to 22-25 paise per voice minute or even lower," said Cellular Operators Association of India (COAI) in its second letter to Nripendra Misra, principal secretary at PMO, in less than a month.
The COAI letter, dated September 2, was sent to the PMO a day after the Reliance IndustriesBSE -0.46 % AGM where Mukesh Ambani had announced Jio's September 5 launch date. ET has reviewed a copy of the letter.
The lobby body, which represents India's biggest GSM carriers, further warned that existing telecom companies "would go into liquidation" long before this reduced weighted average voice realisation is reached.
"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," said Rajan Mathews, director general of the COAI.
Existing operators, he said, would be compelled to handle voice traffic that is double their total present levels.
Read more at:
Not bound to give interconnect points to Reliance Jio: Telcos to PMO - The Economic Times
"Unloading tsunamis of asymmetric incoming voice traffic from a (potential) 100 million Reliance Jio customers can lead to the weighted average voice realisation of existing operators plunging from 30-40 paise per voice minute to 22-25 paise per voice minute or even lower," said Cellular Operators Association of India (COAI) in its second letter to Nripendra Misra, principal secretary at PMO, in less than a month.
The COAI letter, dated September 2, was sent to the PMO a day after the Reliance IndustriesBSE -0.46 % AGM where Mukesh Ambani had announced Jio's September 5 launch date. ET has reviewed a copy of the letter.
The lobby body, which represents India's biggest GSM carriers, further warned that existing telecom companies "would go into liquidation" long before this reduced weighted average voice realisation is reached.
"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," said Rajan Mathews, director general of the COAI.
Existing operators, he said, would be compelled to handle voice traffic that is double their total present levels.
Read more at:
Not bound to give interconnect points to Reliance Jio: Telcos to PMO - The Economic Times
