Indian Operators Warned Over Interconnection Delays

Published on: 18th August 2008

India's telecoms regulator, TRAI has ordered the incumbent GSM operators, including Bharti, Idea, Vodafone, Spice and state controlled BSNL to provide interconnection with Reliance Communications' (RCom) new GSM network and report back once they have complied.

The GSM operators have been trying to delay interconnection claiming that they need to negotiate separate commercial agreements with the company as their existing interconnection agreement only covers Reliance's CDMA network.

The regulator has rejected the reasons though, stating that "This is not tenable as the DoT's instruction dated the 24th March, 2008 for opening of allotted codes and and TRAI's direction of 6th January, 2005 are not subordinate to or conditioned by negotiations between the service providers"

The regulator says that it is of the view that since all the service providers have existing interconnection arrangement/agreements with each other and Points of Interconnection (POI) have already been established for exchanging traffic, the existing interconnection need to be used for exchange of traffic for use of both CDMA and GSM technologies.

The regulator has threatened to seek criminal proceedings against the GSM operators if they do not interconnect with RCom as ordered, and can levy fines of US$4,600 per day until compliance.

 

Tags: [reliance communications]  [rcom]  [reliance]  [bsnl]  [trai]  [spice]  [interconnection]  [India]