After TRAI imposed a proposed penalty of Rs 3,050 crore on Airtel, Vodafone and Idea for not providing enough interconnection points to Reliance Jio, Bharti Airtel today confirmed that it will reach out to both TRAI and DoT to clear out the matter. Last week, TRAI found Airtel,Vodafone and Idea to be non-compliant with licensing policies after continuous call drops and congestion faced by Reliance Jio.
Downplaying the penalty and it implications, Gopal Vittal, MD and CEO, Bharti Airtel said,
“We are aware of proposed penalty. We believe there is confusion here. We will find way to go back to Trai and DoT. We are very confident that government will take a very objective position in the Herculean efforts we have put to resolve this issue,”
As far as Airtel is concerned, TRAI lodged a penalty of Rs 1,000 on the company. Defending Airtel, Vittal further claimed that Airtel has never before added on the scale they have in terms of interconnection points and has in fact has provided about 2.5 times the interconnection ports compared to any other telecom operator in India. Further, Sunil Mittal, Chairman Bharti Enterprises ensured that Interconnection ports have been given liberally and that’s not an issue.
Talking about the free services offered by Reliance Jio, Airtel admitted that its not easy to counter a company who is offering services for free so the company, as of now, is trying to offer bundled packs in order to attract some of the attention. Gopal Mittal further pointed out the fact that when something is being offered for free there is always a scope of quality compromises which Airtel will never do for its customers. Recently, Reliance Jio has been criticized a lot for its slow speeds and poor connectivity which is where this war between Jio and other telecom operator took pace.