TELECOM WARS: Jio vs Incumbents
Bharti Airtel, the telecom giant, announced the launch of a special 4G data pack that offers free data for 90 days (T&C Applied). Interested customers can avail this offer by purchasing the plan for 1495 INR. And if you are a new user, then you can avail this offer with the first recharge 1494 INR. With this ‘special 4G data pack’ users will be getting unlimited free data with a data cap of 30 Gb only. Airtel has done this thing very cunningly hidden the fact in its terms and conditions that the “free” part in the Free Data plan comes in when your 30GB is used up and you can still access the internet at 240 kbps crippling speeds.Another hidden condition is that you get the 15GB first and then you have to apply for the next 15GB on the app.
We want to ask our readers If Airtel could give away data for as low as 50/GB why has it is been steadily increasing tariff for the past decade!!?? Other unreasonable terms and conditions include paying the entire amount upfront, and it is only available to pre-paid Airtel customers and not the post-paid ones.
This limits the number of Airtel customers who can access the plan. While as we all know, Jio is still free for the next four months and all their plans will be available to all users.
Jio vs the Telecom World
RJIL has been completely ready to accept any augmentation of POIs from Airtel and other incumbent operators. As against allegation of under-preparedness and insufficient testing teams and efforts, reality is that work has not been held up at Jio’s end even briefly. Jio’s networks work at amazing speed and quality in a jio-to-jio network.
Airtel has itself said that inspite of severe QoS (Quality of Service)and congestion issues, it has provisioned capacity in 10 days against their entitlement of 90 days. Furthermore, 10 days is too long given the current QOS parameters. There is no entitlement of timing when it comes to such severe breach of QOS as against the 90 days sought by Airtel.
The numbers should give you an Idea about the current situation.While Idea has agreed to relent more POI i.e. 1,865 ports for access, from 565 earlier - a 230% increase, yet Jio has countered saying Idea's offer is inadequate. Jio has noted that four crore calls were dropping a day between the two networks, or over 750 calls failing per 1,000.
Quality of service requirement regulation states that to maintain QoS, less than 5 calls should fail per 1,000 calls made but Idea Cellular has operationalised just 50 new E1s in the last 10 days as a result of which call failure rate has been increasing drastically. The proposed augmentation by Idea increases capacity by only 34%, which is grossly inadequate, since then augmented capacity would still be less than 40% of the initial firm demand placed by Jio based with Idea several months ago!!
Vodafone seems to be least interested of all .Vodafone, the second largest telecom operator in the country, drops 25 crore calls in the last week. To top this, Vodafone seems to be least interested in fixing the problem and has not replied to any queries for more interconnect points from Jio. While other companies have atleast promised to help with interconnect points, no such assurance has come from Vodafone and it wants to wait till Jio commercial launch.
TRAI has largely sided with Jio and issued show-cause notice to the incumbents regarding the QoS issue. TRAI’s stance — and the Department of Telecommunications (DoT)’ hesitance to intervene in what is essentially a quality of service issue — doesn’t bode well for Airtel, Vodafone and Idea who have until next week to reply to the regulator’s show-cause notice.
According to the masses, there has been a fabulous response to Jio’s commencement of operations, with millions of customers joining the network in the first few days itself.In anticipation of such demand for services, Jio had given its projections for POI requirement to Airtel over 3 months ago. The massive deterioration in QOS parameters would not have occurred had Airtel, Vodafone and Idea augmented POIs on a timely basis. Such anti-competitive tactics show that these networks are really afraid of newly launched players Jio eating into their market share.
