With Reliance Jio free unlimited welcome offer to come to an end on 31st December 2016 and subscribers are still facing massive call drops to all major telcos in the country.
To discuss this massive call drop issue affecting million of telecom customers in the country, a Parliamentary panel has called all telecom operators along with the Department of Telecom (DoT) and TRAI for a meeting on November 10th 2016.
The Parliamentary Standing Committee on Information Technology is headed by BJP MP Anurag Thakur. According to a Lok Sabha notice the subject for discussion is “Issues related to the quality of services and reported call drops”. The panel will discuss the matter of call drop issue with members of industry body Cellular Operators Association of India (COAI) and Reliance Jio separately. This will be followed by a meeting with representatives of DoT and telecom regulator TRAI.
It to be noted that Reliance Jio has earlier blamed COAI for promoting vested interest of incumbent telecom operators — Airtel, Vodafone and Idea Cellular. There has been a major tussle between Reliance Jio and incumbent telcos for not providing an adequate point of interconnection (POIs). This in-turn resulted in subscribers not able to make voice calls to other networks and massive call failures between Jio and other networks. As per the telecom rules, not more than five calls in 1,000 should fail due to network congestion.
Earlier TRAI has recommended Department of Telecommunication (DOT) to slap a combined penalty of Rs 3,050 crore on India’s top three telecom operators. The fine is for violating the telecom licence norms by denying adequate interconnection points to Reliance Jio.