Jio distorts facts to create policy bias in its favour: Airtel
India’s largest telco Bharti Airtel Ltd Wednesday wrote to the country’s telecom regulator that Mukesh Ambanipromoted Reliance Jio Infocomm Ltd was trying to distort facts at various platforms to “show other operators in bad light and create policy bias in its favour”.
The bone of contention is interconnection user charges (IUC), paid by the telco which originates the call, to the one which terminates the call, currently set at 14 paise. Older telcos want it to be raised to at least 30 paise, while new entrant Jio wants it cut to zero. Jio said in July that India’s top three telcos earned ₹1.04 lakh crore in the past five years by not implementing a 2011 regulatory road map to cut IUC to zero.
Countering this argument in a letter addressed to the chairman of Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI), Airtel said it has not made any gains due to IUC and has instead incurred a loss of ₹6,800 crore in the last five years.
In the letter, reviewed by Mint, Airtel said Jio did not indicate its source of information to analyse Airtel’s IUC revenues and cited the quantum of IUC received at the gross level. Even the gross figures are much higher than what it actually received, Airtel said.
Airtel said it has received a net IUC of ₹7,795 crore in last five years. Even at present value, the net IUC received stands at ₹9,417 crore, it said.
“This is not the first time that Reliance Jio has adopted such tactics. Even during its representation to the Inter-Ministerial Group, Reliance Jio had come up with misleading claims that existing operators have not infused enough equity into their operations and instead taken on debt. The truth is completely different though,” Airtel said.