After announcing the Reliance Jio new telecom, the Mukesh Ambani-led Reliance has been in the news regularly. Now the latest news is that the Reliance Jio Infocomm has filed a complaint against Vodafone, Bharti Airtel and Idea Cellular with the Competition Commission of India (CCI).
The company has filed the complaint about abusing and acting like a cartel in the telecom industry. According to the reports, Jio has registered a case on the basis of the letter written to the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) and also to the Department of Telecom (DoT) in the last month.
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As per the letter, the Bharti Airtel, Vodafone and Idea along with their industry COAI (Cellular Operators Association of India) have denied the interconnection with Reliance Jio. The charges were made in the backdrop of insufficient availability of interconnection and also abusing against the public interest. Reliance Jio has been fighting the top three operators over the issue of the interconnect points and provision of number portability facility.
Idea Cellular’s chief executive officer Himanshu Kapania said, “No such details have reached us from CCI. The idea will never be involved in any form of cartelization. The group has the highest measures of compliance. The mobile industry is hyper-competitive with 8-9 operators active per circle. The idea is ranked third with just 18-19 percent market share, so has limited market power.”
Airtel too said, “That it has not heard from CCI and in turn alleged Reliance Jio’s claims follow a standard pattern of browbeating aimed at creating multiple regulatory hurdles in the sincere efforts of other players in the space”.
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The subsidiary of Reliance Industries Limited (RIL), Reliance Jio Infocomm has a signed a new record of 50 million subscribers in 83 days of its commercial launch. According to the sources, last month the company officially announced that it had added a record of 16 million customers in only 26days of its launch.
Earlier in the December 2015, the Reliance Jio has introduced the 4G services for its employees and it has officially launched for all in the month of September 2016. The company said that they are aiming to reach 100 million subscribers by the end of 2016. But it seems like it adds around only 20 million subscribers by the end.
Its rivals, Airtel took 12 years to cross 50 million customers and for both Vodafone and Idea it took 13 years to reach. Currently, Reliance Jio covers 4G network in around 2 lakh villages and 18,000 cities and towns.
