Airtel’s Sunil Mittal all set to take Reliance Jio by its horns, says bring it on

There is Mukesh Ambani-led Reliance Jio on one side and other incumbent telecom players on the other. The moment Reliance Jio was launched, it was quite evident it will trigger a war of pricing, interconnections between the two sides.

Ambani had even nudged the top telecom players to provide Points of Interconnection (POIs) but the latter said they were not obliged to do so.

The issue is still not resolved between the two sides and Reliance Jio has just taken the competition higher only.

In an interview to ET, Bharti Airtel Chairman Sunil Mittal said ‘bring it on’.

Mittal said the issues pertaining to PoIs and Mobile Number Portability (MNP) will be sorted out in next few weeks.

"We are a product of competition. There was AT&T, Hutchinson was here, Etisalat came, Telenor, we are fighting with Idea and Vodafone on a daily basis. So the best and the brightest have been here and so we must have done something right," Mittal told ET.

But, the POIs issue is not defusing and even the TRAI is involved in it. Mittal said everything should be sorted through dialogue.

"With every passing week things will get better on the Point issue. We all agree that the PoI issue needs to stop and it will cease in a few weeks. There needs to be a dialogue between all companies to correct the issues," Mittal told ET.

When Ambani announced free voice calls for lifetime, shares of Airtel and Idea had tanked. But, Mittal was not surprised.

Mittal said going forward, voice business will decline and data will be the growth driver, which is why bundled tariff plans would be the norm for the industry with protecting average revenue per user (ARPU) the main focus.

"The tariffs announced (by Jio) are ARPU protected," he said.

Now, after the Jio launch, a lot of buzz is around upcoming mega spectrum sale.

"The government has itself acknowledged that there was indeed a scarcity of spectrum in saying that after this auction operators shouldn't complain about scarcity of bandwidth. We would like to thank the government for releasing so much bandwidth. However, I still maintain that the price of 700 Mhz is still very high," he added.