Vodafone India and Bharti Airtel, the two leading telecom operators of India, argued Reliance Jio Infocomm, the with newbie contender. The argument took place at an open house conversation last week over modalities of examining a network at the forefront of a commercial launch.
While the current players claimed that the consumers attained for trial purposes must be limited, not provided MNP (Mobile Number Portability), and not permitted to enroll for commercial services. Jio disagreed claiming that such decisions will disturb a flawless move to commercial operations from trials. At the meeting on network examination prior to a commercial roll out, Ravi Gandhi, Chief Regulatory Officer of Bharti Airtel claimed that test consumers must not be permitted to shift to commercial facilities.
“There must not be user acquisition in the name of examining, and there must be a time-restriction for a network trial facility,” Gandhi claimed, adding that load examining has never been conducted with users all over the world. An executive of Jio, on the other hand, claimed that telecom companies must be permitted to enroll test consumers and no limitations must be applied so that they can flawlessly shift after a commercial roll out.
The policies, the executive claimed to the media, must be such that users must be informed of the test stage and, finally, requested to shift to commercial facilities. “Since the operator is in agreement with lawful interception and necessary criteria, there is no requirement to put constraints that would have an unfavorable effect. Such a limitation will be counter-fruitful and operators must be provided with a free hand,” the executive of Jio claimed to the media in an interview.
The Mukesh Ambani-possessed Jio rolled out 4G-based telecom facilities in September 2016. The current players had suspected that Jio had begun adding subscribers and providing commercial services even before September under the name of testing its network. They have also hesitated to the recent consultation documents on testing blaming that the harm had already been done when Jio was permitted to continue with signing on users before September, and the recent documents was excessively late. Jio had previously refused any wrongdoing.
Vodafone India claimed that attaining test consumers prior to roll out of service was against license policies. It claimed that the current consultation can’t deal with this as a potential problem since the past problems around Jio were applicable for beginning of the present consultation.
