Reliance Jio just won another battle against the top three telecom providers “ Vodafone, Airtel and Idea. The Telcom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) has ruled that the three providers should pay Reliance Jio a sum of Rs 3,050 crore for not providing adequate point-to-point connectivity. The big three argued that congestion in networks was on account of the free calls from the Jio network, but TRAI did not buy this line. TRAI had been investigating charges levelled by Jio that the big three ganged up to block its services. TRAI had concluded that congestion level was as high as 96 per cent against the permissible limit of 0.5 per cent. For call drops, the failure should not be more than two per cent. However, TRAI arrived at its conclusions based on data for three days which appears to be too small a sample. While the date certainly shows high congestion levels, there is still no evidence to prove that this is being deliberately done. TRAI should have also examined if free services gifted by Jio were creating the congestion before arriving at a conclusion.
