Mukesh Ambani says Jio's rivals making excuses over interconnect

Moneycontrol BureauThe ongoing fight between Reliance Industries-promoted Jio and rival telecom operators over interconnection is intensifying by the day. A report in the Business Standard says Reliance Jio is likely to sue incumbent telecom operators as they are not granting it adequate points of interconnection.Points of interconnection enable an operator to complete calls made to another operator’s networkAfter Jio’s official launch, the telcos had informed the Prime Minister’s Office that they were under no obligation and in no position as well to grant Reliance Jio Infocomm’s requests for interconnection points due to inadequate network and a financial crunch.In an interview to The Economic Times on Wednesday, Reliance Industries Chairman Mukesh Ambani accused incumbent telecom operators of making excuses to block Jio calls."You are supposed to augment interconnect when the current capacity utilisation reaches 70 percent,” Ambani said. “You cannot use excuses that someone is doing promotions, capacity requirement has gone up, etc. Those are not acceptable," he said.At the company’s annual general meeting last week, Ambani said because of the interconnection problem, Reliance Jio users were struggling with voice calls.“In the last week alone, Jio customers suffered over 5 crores call failures to other networks because of insufficient interconnect capacity provided by incumbents,” Ambani had said.“....giving the impression to common Jio customers that voice is not working, when actually the incumbent operators are deliberately dropping calls,” he said.In an interview to CNBC-TV18 last week, Rajan Mathews, the Director-General of Cellular Operators Association of India had said incumbents were providing interconnection points, but it was a question of whether it was “adequate to meet the projected amounts that RIL is proposing.”“That is again a decision that must be made in the context of commercial service not in the context of what we believe to be test period,” he had said.Disclaimer: Reliance Industries, which owns Reliance Jio, also owns Network18, which publishes Moneycontrol.com.