Reliance Jio now says operators violating portability norms

Reliance Jio has sought the industry watchdog's intervention over the three main telecom operators -- Airtel, Vodafone and Idea -- refusing to allow porting of their subscribers to its network, in an alleged disregard to licensing norms.

"Reliance Jio Infocomm, vide letters dated September 2, 2016, sent individually to Bharti Airtel, Idea and Vodafone, who are the incumbent dominant operators, informing them that Reliance Jio would be commencing its services from September 5," the company said in its letter.

"In spite of being under legal and contractual obligation to port the numbers after a valid request is made, the incumbent dominant operators have rejected all the requests made for porting between Sep 5 to Sep 12," said the letter to the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI).

The letter said against 201 total requests made to the three operators -- to Airtel the most, followed by Idea and then Vodafone -- 161 of them have violated the contractual obligations and eight were subject to wrong coding, among other issues.

None were successfully completed, it said, and elaborated upon the portability regulations.

IANS sent queries to all the three operators. Vodafone and Idea did not respond. Airtel's spokesperson said in a one-line written response that the company was processing all porting requests as per guidelines.

"Please note that these rejections are in addition to the rejection of mobile number portability request of 4,919 corporate mobile numbers issued to employees and members of Reliance Industries Group by Bharti Airtel in August 2016," the Reliance Jio letter said.

"Reliance Jio sincerely requests that the TRAI take serious cognizance of this complaint and intervene by taking strict action against incumbent dominant operators under the relevant provisions of the mobile number portability regulations and the unified licence," it said.

The letter comes just as the incumbent operators and Reliance Jio appeared to be in the process of settling their differences over providing enough points of inter-connect for calls from the latter's network to go through to their own subscribers.

--IANS

ap/rn