Mukesh Ambani urges incumbent telcos to play fair

NEW DELHI: Reliance Industries Chairman Mukesh Ambani appealed to incumbent operators to give adequate points of interconnection (PoIs) to Reliance Jio so that latter’s subscribers don’t face call drops.
He also urged operators to allow their users to switch to Jio if they want , as per license conditions.
“In the last week alone, Jio customers suffered over 5 crore call failures to other networks because of insufficient interconnect capacity,” Ambani said, while addressing shareholders Thursday .
He said that this gives the impression to Jio customers that voice is not working, when actually the incumbent operators are deliberately dropping calls.
“Incumbent operators have advantages over new entrants, have well-established networks, customers. The incumbent operators have a legal obligation to provide points of interconnect,” Ambani said.
“The onus is rightly on the incumbent operators not to misuse their market power by creating unfair hurdles,” he added.
He also urged the incumbent operators not to restrict customers from moving over to the Jio network using mobile number portability (MNP).
“I appeal to my fellow operators to do their part to create a fair framework of co-opetition that is good for India and Indian customers,” he said.
Jio has previously blamed incumbent operators for not giving it adequate points of interconnection. This has led to 65 per cent of the calls from Jio's network dropping, forcing it to delay its commercial rollout, the company has claimed. India's top telcos in turn have accused Jio of running commercial operations in the guise of trials and violating rules, and said they wouldn't give more PoIs till Jio launches operations commercially.